Exploring Human Freedom and Sanity
We don't belong here. We weren't designed for this, but we are stuck in it. Nobody escapes without first embracing this. The escape we seek is the freedom to face this world from a place where sanity rules, and frankly that's outside it.
The English language, and the entire thought process behind it, lacks the facility for handling this discussion properly. So it is with most European tongues. It's quite a chore to put this discussion in plain terms, which is why I often resort to fiction to introduce the underlying concepts. But this time we are going to try our best to make sense of it in somewhat clinical terms.
Our current plane of existence is a mess. Worse, it can't be fixed. It's basically a prison, so it's not supposed to be nice. Any effort we expend in making it nicer must be sensibly limited to things we can actually do. The problem is primarily one of perception. There is another plane of existence, but everything around us militates against that idea, never mind how to access it.
If the notion of another plane of existence finds root in your mind, there is some hope for you. It shows some part of you has been awakened to the inherent conflict in each of us, making us long for something better. It shows you also possess sufficient skepticism to avoid being suckered into thinking that "better" has to be here. The next step is helping you realize just about everything around you is built to keep that other plane, that Other Side, away from you.
The easiest thing about keeping it away from us is mixing perception. Any amount of truth in the matter, plus one single plausible falsehood, is all it takes. It's as if someone is presenting any number of combinations, each indicating some sort of parallel universe, none of which actually exist. Each is offered as "The Way of Truth" and each has its own mix of flaws, designed to soothe the haunting question born in each of us in our many varieties of needs. Any way you can be channeled into an acceptable failure will do, because the most dangerous thing of all is escaping the channels.
The primary reason this works so well is all of us instinctively fear being alone, so we keep seeking some sense of inclusion somewhere. We even get deluded about that, given there is any number of classical Loner channels to make us feel accepted and recognized in our fake uniqueness. That's just one example of channeling and herding. Nobody escapes that easily. We all have vulnerabilities, subject to endless ways of manipulation, keeping us in the prison.
So the first step is something in you recognizing you are in prison, as it were. Until you embrace that fully, you can't possibly consider escape.
Recent articles point to the notion humans will likely evolve to some higher state. If not, surely science will find enhancements, ways we can meld with the seemingly ideal intellectual capacities of the computers on which we have come to depend so much. All well and good; push it as far as you can. You still won't escape the prison.
The prison walls are the sort of discrete logic which many hold up as the answer to all man's needs. Whether inductive or deductive, linear logic, compartmental objectivity, or any other means of pure intellectual analysis, it can only take you to the limits of the prison. They can't take you out, because the intellect is the prison.
We are all well aware of our emotions and the threat from brute instincts. Those things serve well enough if you are merely an animal among other animals. When you are a human among other humans, they can be pretty destructive. We acknowledge them, but wisely avoid letting them vote on much because most of our time is in rational space, among rational beings. Even those precious few moments when threats to life and limb push us into animal territory, emotions and instincts are deeply flawed. We can train those instincts, but then you are simply a really fine warrior. There is still a need for working toward a more peaceful and sane life, something instincts do poorly.
While inside the prison, we should realize peace is not an absolute, but a relative condition. We want things to be as good as they can get, because that pulls us up out of the animal existence far enough to give attention to things which make escape possible. So we seek to cultivate the intellect and give it charge over the lower impulses. But if this is all we have, we are in most woeful shape. The prison of intellect can only keep us in the prison. There is surely a way to reach beyond the limits, to enhance our dealings within the prison. We want to draw down into our limited existence some of what makes freedom free.
It is most certainly true humans possess a capacity for something outside the intellect, something above it, not below it as with emotions. This capacity is not simply more of the same. Nor is it simply a better version of intellect. Granted, we hardly tap the limits of our minds now, such that far greater things are possible with that alone. But even those far higher uses of the mind are still within the prison.
This other capacity is of itself a wholly other thing. Precious few people believe it exists, which makes keeping us in the prison far easier. Some get just a taste of it with intuition. For this discussion, intuition is the ability to skip some steps in the linear reasoning process and arrive at a conclusion. Without chasing all the paths that could lead to, intuition means dipping into the subconscious, not the emotions. Thus, what we seek for our escape resides there. We need something more than intuition.
Hard sciences pretend, at least, to follow a clearly logical process. Most people don't understand the whole idea. They get the part about sampling data, organizing, and reaching certain hypotheses. They don't get the testing part. Hypotheses are tested, not by proving, but by attempting to disprove, to show there are conditions when it does not work. Then the hypothesis is reworked and the testing proceeds from there. We presume a certain honesty in the effort to disprove, but you and I know in reality scientists are people, too. They will cheat themselves and everyone else because they believe things strongly. Politics infest the hard sciences, too. No one living is truly and fully able to be impartial, so science is sometimes just an expensive guessing game, and results are overturned later.
The softer sciences, so-called, are actually simpler. If we talk about economics, we can lay out a vast hoard of data, interpret what the data seems to indicate, and conduct various tests to verify our interpretation. No one expects pure scientific work, just a reasonable estimation. Oddly, the application of such is often very dogmatic, with grand orthodoxies aplenty. The results may take a while, but most of the time these orthodoxies crash because politic pressure is even stronger in behavioral sciences, of which Political Science is but a sub-genre.
Attempts to use computers still suffers from the bias of the programmers. For all our efforts mankind is not capable of creating a purely logical process of deciding what we should do in this world. The conflict between what might well be the very best answer versus the one we can persuade others to accept is still the most infuriating aspect of it all. We seldom use even the best we get from such shaky processes as the various sciences. Yet a very strong part of our prison is we are compelled to act as if the best of science somehow matters, in spite of the background awareness we never will know because we don't get to try it.
To a large degree, this is the nature of the prison. We might have an intellectual awareness of better things, but things never seems to head far towards the best answer before someone exercising some power over others hijacks it. There is something at work which forbids even the best we can know, and that something is the prison.
This prison has a warden. While the warden is a person in one sense, nothing in our intellect is prepared to handle properly the nature of this person, so we end up with an "It." Yet It is a person, insisting on asserting It's power over the rest of us. The primary failure of those who think about escaping is trying to deny the personal nature of It. This is the same blindness which finds people honestly expecting somehow to overcome human nature and enforce purity of thought and science. Not only is any particular pure answer unlikely to be The One Truth, because we are all in prison, but we can't find a way to apply that truth without some leverage against the masses.
The fundamental nature of dealing with people is that they are people, with more variations than anyone likes to admit. We have to make generalizations or we can't even pretend to have behavioral science, and they are academically valid exercises. But it always breaks down when you try to make it work in the real world. People are still people, and nothing inside this prison will ever make them more than broken people in prison. Whatever system you create to make things better absolutely must include a very human flexibility, or it is wrong before it starts.
We are obliged to understand this whole situation is a matter of persons, not objective truth. A critical element in escaping the prison is escaping the false notion there is such a thing as objective truth. Everything truly critical to freedom is inherently personal in nature.
In some ways, the prison itself is a living entity. It is most certainly composed of living beings, since no system of life can organize itself without life. A fundamental defining characteristic of the prison is denying that it lives. We add this to the previously discussed basic facts it is a prison, and that it has a warden which operates as a being with a distinct will to keep us imprisoned.
The only escape lies within you.
That is, the only hope for beginning to come out of this prison is finding the escape route inside yourself. If it's not within, you cannot go out, cannot see out. As noted, the first steps of freedom are embracing the facts. If you are capable of embracing these things, the window is open. You will be able to see outside, and begin discerning what is there, what it all means. Obviously, if these notions remain alien, you won't have any hope.
The mechanics of building that hope are so simple, most people reject that, too. In clinical terms, you have to break the most confining element of the prison itself: time. Granted, everything we know is constrained by the passage of time, quantifying it, etc. Those who live by the clock will never see outside. We cannot simply cut off the entire world around us, because that would offer them no hope or help, either. Rather, we have to build an internal mechanism for handling time in alternative ways to match the need, to operate on two levels at the same time.
Freedom is learning to operate outside of time constraints, as if time were not a controlling factor of your existence, but a variable much the same as spatial dimensions. This is similar, but not precisely the same as the concept of the 4th Dimension so popular in Science Fiction and theoretical physics. What we aim at here is not cold and lifeless theory, nor empty fiction, but a very personal dimension, an internal capacity.
So the first step is placing yourself in experiences where time fades from consciousness as much as possible. Few are able to make this jump quickly. We all experience situations where we forget what time it is, but rare is the person who is able to recover without being a wretched self-centered ogre. The point is to emphasize time might limit our options on the lower plane, but not rule all our actions, and certainly not our perceptions. We should rise to a point where we think of time as something which brings ripeness, not constraints.
A favorable exercise for beginning this transition is placing yourself in a situation where time is allowed to recede into insignificance. Simply stop letting a tight schedule rule every moment of your day. Open a gap in the regimentation and take time away in exchange for quiet. Get alone with yourself. It's okay if the first few times you are just unwinding from the rat race itself. Whatever you do, don't load that space with distractions. You really must be alone with yourself as much as possible, creating a distance between yourself and the system, the prison routine.
An example would be going out to an isolated hill top, somewhere people don't crush past in great numbers. While an isolation chamber of some sort might work in a pinch, it is not at all like being alone in a large space. The psychological difference is huge at first. You have to absorb the peace of the moment in large doses until you start carrying it around with you. It really should be daily, and you should take the risk of leaving behind anything that allows a part of your consciousness to mark the passage of time.
Listen to the sounds; don't struggle to organize and recognize the sources so much as just notice. Feel the air movements, the temperature variations, sense the moment as a whole. Until you can learn to do nothing correctly, almost nothing you do will matter.
There is no goal; there is only process.
As commonly conceived, there is actually no such thing as "objective reality." We can approach it, but the closer we come, the more uncertain it becomes. In Particle Physics, for example, we have long known the mere act of observing an event changes it. More recently, it was noted a choice made in the present can alter reality itself for the unknown past. That is, on the level of quantum particles, a change you introduce to one set of observable particles now will affect other particles you have not yet observed. You can probably read up on such experiments, but it quickly becomes a huge project just understanding it. Yet, at some fundamental level, all of reality, such as it may be, is actually dependent on observation.
There is a sense in which this extrapolates to everything you experience. Perception is reality. The business of escaping the prison is setting your perception free from the confinement or mere emotion and reason, by adding an upper layer of perception drawn from the subconscious. A life of conditioning under the mass hypnosis of the rational animal world starts with breaking the regimentation of time. Thus the exercise of getting alone with yourself and learning to open your physical perception in a way which holds no objective, no particular purpose other than learning to perceive.
Furthermore, nothing in the rational mind can enhance this process, except to get out of the way. An awful lot of Eastern Mystical religious exercises are actually overly regimented, with elaborate prescribed routines, and often the results are equally artificial. At the same time, too much of what passes for Western Mysticism is really just another brand of reason, still intellectual, just a different framework. What we seek is to harness reason and thinking as servants to much higher faculty. We learn to evaluate in that upper realm, not with the rational faculty. Rather, the mind serves to organize your response to what is demanded by that higher grasp.
The most important thing to open up is the discovery process of your own internal reality. The one thing in this life most worth knowing is yourself, particularly what makes you tick. There is no analytical framework capable of doing this for you. What matters most is simply recognizing what matters most. From birth you are imprinted with a unique character, and the first few years of life add to it. From that time on, the issue is not formation but awareness, and the current system all over the world seeks to prevent that awareness.
You can flavor your discovery any way you like, but the clinical understanding is referring to imperatives, those things you simply cannot walk away from, haunting you when you dare to ignore them. Those times alone in silence should have the effect of clarifying under the debris of prison conditioning what was there all along, what it is that makes you what you are. It means fully embracing a lot of things you probably were taught to hate, to doubt, to fear. Until you dig up that bedrock of identity, you cannot possibly escape the prison.
This discovery is not something accomplished, but engaged, because along with major blocks of revelation, there are subtle nuances which escape us until the time is ripe to know them.
As you come to know your self better, and the imperatives which drive your conscience, you begin seeking ways to break from commitments which don't match. The process tends to be quite painful for most, particularly at first.
The single greatest obstruction will be materialism. No one says you have to divest yourself from every single material possession, only those which interfere with the process. Those which are necessary or useful to the process you should keep until events beyond your control take them. That means events which do not depend on your imperatives, which you should not try to control, also. As the process rolls on, the imperatives will speak more clearly on material goods and you will find yourself quick to drop anything which simply does not help, regardless of the value your fellow prisoners place on it.
But it's not just material objects, it's a whole host of relationships, habits, default choices, learned perceptions and so on. At some advanced point, you'll be able to discern when any of those things is neutral, and you'll know how to treat it so. But at first, just about everything not actively useful is probably harmful. No one can decide this for you. Shedding hindrances is like shedding the shackles which make prison worse than it has to be.
Buried in those imperatives you will eventually find something which calls to your resources on behalf of others. This is more difficult especially for those who have always thought they were doing good for others in the first place. You have a great deal to unlearn about that. The most important help you can offer anyone, and by extension everyone, is simply acting on your imperatives. The greatest harm you can do is substituting someone else's imperatives for your own. But if you can't find a place where others matter, then you aren't free yet.
Your abilities and resources are shaped by your destiny. The vast majority never come close to their destiny, so they die in prison. Your destiny is freedom on whatever terms are built into your character. In a sense, you don't steer a single thing; you simply place yourself in the stream, and things will draw you forward to that destiny.
Prison is a living organism, the warden is a being actively and intelligently seeking to keep you blind and locked down. By the same token, your destiny is a living Being. Again, you can imbue it with all sorts of flavors and traits, and none of them will quite fit, but that your destiny is alive and self-aware will become obvious if you are breaking free. It wants you alive, sane and wide open to the existence for which we were designed. It works out entirely organically, and actually requires very little active struggle, aside from the struggle to suppress the lies which keep you bound.
Thus, it should be obvious why you end up caring about others, because any Being who wants you free surely wants that for others. You must accept the burden of acting on your destiny as the one and only means to helping. Once you are free, you can afford to care, even when you are utterly powerless to actually do or say anything. Be sure you understand that the ability hate any other person is a prime effect of bondage.
Distrust is not the same thing, since you can't even trust yourself, when it comes right down to it. A healthy distrust is simply cutting away the expectancy of support from another, not allowing anyone's failure to change your commitments, and certainly not shaking your sense of freedom. The point is you aren't wrapped up in commitments to things and mere ideas, but commitment only to your destiny, your imperatives. There are no goals, only processes, and how you deal with other prisoners is a critical element of your destiny. You offer your concern for their welfare within the bounds of your imperatives, regardless of what you can do, because the only thing you can give them that really matters is that sense of sharing their sorrows, their bondage, as you feel your own. Their response is their own problem, not yours.
There is no success, no failure. There is only commitment and persistence in the process. There are no real goals, no winning or losing, only engaging your imperatives. There is no frustration because you don't expect to have control over yourself, even, much less a host of things around you.
However, living in the stream of your destiny does bring about an endpoint of ripeness. Nothing about this will be convenient, because the ripeness is not in your hands, and is totally independent of factors on this plane. Yes, of course your final crossing over to that Other Side will surely be the result of things done to your body here to release you. Yes, you can foolishly disrupt the flow, and could go back to the prison, and even take your own life. That is not your destiny. You can only call it destiny when you are standing on your imperatives to meet that ripeness when it arrives.
The Other Side, your freedom, beckons you here in the prison. You must belong to it now, so that it claims you at ripeness, because any other path will miss that moment. Indeed, any other path cannot bring you to ripeness, only that final indignity of meaningless expiration. You would still be dead before it came, in a sense.
If this Other Side calls to you, then we have before us the known clinical description of how to let it find you. It means dismissing all the things which make up the prison. Yes, until ripeness you have to acknowledge where you are, still in the prison, even as you belong to freedom. It's the ultimate paradox we exist in this torn state primarily to let others see what they are missing.
They see someone who does not compete, but may well seem fully involved because it's imperative. You finish the thing if it's ripe, but can dismiss it all and stop right in the middle of anything for which there is no imperative to finish. Only if it serves destiny do you stay the course.
We cannot even say it's a matter of being this or that, mostly because it's not a matter of our understanding what we are, only what we must embrace. So the others see someone quite serene, at rest and internally free on that higher level. Your imperatives take from you the unquenchable urge to control, and you can afford to let others do and be what they think is demanded of them, regardless how it affects you. Sure, you can defend anything which your imperatives demand, but it's never with anger. You can always let it go when the thing ripens. The tools of this level of existence -- which is everything in it, attached to it -- aren't that important.
Ripeness comes often without warning, but you will know in that higher sense. If your mind has been taught to know its place, somewhere below that other faculty, it will know how to be told, and it will recognize the signal this or that thing is ripe. It has nothing to do with efficiency, rationality, cost in resources, or any measure which so chains those who still think the prison is freedom. So our minds are aware of these things, but they know it may not matter a whit against the imperatives. The sense of imperative declares when ripeness has come, and the mind obeys.
Plans, hopes and dreams of prisoners we recognize; with their sorrows and pains we empathize; but we don't live there any more. We live on the Other Side, even before we reach it. We seek a destiny they cannot know, and a ripeness that takes us finally across to the Other Side.
Ed Hurst
27 August 2010
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