Freedom is not something that can be given. It can only be quietly stolen – and even then, its from ourselves that we have to take it.
If some part of you colludes with authority out of the wish to be told what to do, to be looked after or to have life sufficiently regimented not have to ponder it, then you’ll turn a blind eye to the price that you pay for the priviledge.
The route of least resistance means renouncing your own authority and grabbing at the invitation to be led by the nose. Our glorious leaders will comply all too swiftly and then take their own route of least resistance into hubris and corruption.
So, everyone gets to be a baby.
Instant gratification for all.
what a clever trick.
We tell ourselves that we’re not babies….
yeah wiv, wiv, Voting an’ Freedom an all….
Except that it is precisely your vote that has actively helped bring about the covert intention of the One System system, which is that 93% of the world’s wealth lies in the bank accounts of eight families.
Or is the erosion of the middle classes and the consequent vast increases in inequality just an anomalie of the system? Could it not be simply fulfilling its purpose? Stuffing itself to engorgement whilst selling you the idea that you are free?
and evolved.
The ‘rule of intentionality’, says things go the way that they are pointed and so if there seems to be a contradiction in our system its on account of a collective split in the fabric of Western Civilisation’s reality.
When a child loses its mother, or is faced by a mother who is on automatic pilot, the child splits itself in order to cope with the trauma.
” The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. Far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.” Judith Herman.
Our culturally endemic narcissism helps us do this….
”Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” George Orwell.
and yet
”There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou.
Its not just the trauma of loss but what then fails to occur, the pinched emptiness and emotional malnourishment that’s part and parcel of things that don’t happen and stories that aren’t told.
Part of the child stays in touch with what is going on, but has to hive off and suppress the story of the traumatised self to do so.
The problem with this slight of hand is that the divided self then has to live in a divided world in order to be congruent with it. It has to pour extra energy into interpreting that world and even more into ‘how-life-has-to-be’.
Collectively, this is exactly what has happened. We really have been separated from the Great Mother. We collectively respond in the same way as any child deprived of its Mother. We go numb, can’t really remember stuff, and construct a split reality to live our split selves in.
”Trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called “doublethink,” and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call “dissociation.”‘ Judith Herman
Our split, doublethink, world deals with some pretty tough contradictions, but still manages to preserve the notion that we’re ‘free’…. whilst compulsively living the same groundhog day for decades at a time, following slavish routines determined by others in pursuit of goals that come in the mail…
We think of ourselves as democratic whilst being perfectly aware that we are actually ruled by oligarchic mega-corporations.
”What do you think of Western Democracy?”
someone once asked Ghandi.
”I think it would be a very good idea,”
he replied.
We applaud our ‘standard of living’, whilst being appalled at how much crap we trick ourselves into amassing. We guage our worth by the size of the pile, build it up, tend the pile, polish and preen it, then take detox weekends to get away from it all.
We’re spiritually evolved yet still collectively judge our worth by what we drive and which neighbourhood we live in.
We think of ourselves as god’s meek children whilst inflatedly sucking the world dry.
We pride ourselves on our pile whilst acknowledging that money can’t buy love. We loath consumerism but run ourselves into the ground in pursuit of it.
I and me not talking to each other is the lynch pin of this split reality. For as long as the path between their houses remains overgrown you can happily live with even the most crucifying of contradictions.
And be eternally controlled on account of it.
Why?
Because the divided are easily ruled.
Whether its sending humanitarian aid to wartorn countries in the same container as automatic weapons, or espousing compassion for others whilst allowing yourself to be treated like dirt, the trick of keeping I and me apart so as not to question stuff works like a charm.
In 1940 Stalin bought out a ‘Muttering law”, which said that you could get 25 years in the Gulag for talking to yourself. His mate Adolf (on the opposite side) thought this was such a good idea he implimented the same law a year later.
Thou shalt not speak to thyself.
Why?
Because Consciousness can’t be policed and when the inner split is mended people are more difficult to boss about.
”The best instruction you could ever give a poet: don’t ignore the honest muttering in your head.” Alice Oswald
Muttering is the spontaneous expression of forbidden truth. Its the secret story of the suppressed self. Mostly we think of stuff and then give it expression. Muttering is the other way around, you hear yourself after the fact. Its a kind of coaching, or in fact, mothering of oneself. The word ‘mutter’ comes from the German for ‘mother’. When we mutter we are mothering ouselves. I and me are sharing the comfort of inner truths.
So listen to mutter, pay attention to what you say under your breath and through clenched teeth, hear the words of that song you keep humming. Do it out loud and deliberate. Whatever it is, is asking for more expression and validation by insisting itself on consciousness in this way.
Muttering is a form of what used to be called parapraxes, like slips of the tongue, because its rare that the content of the muttering comes fully to light. So the task is to listen to yourself muttering and really hear it, be its advocate. Then it will settle down.
They say that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Its not. Its the first sign of truth squeezing past the inner censors. That’s why Stalin and Hitler banned it. They saw that it liberated people from their oppression by overcoming the inner division that had previously rendered them so maleable.