What is Liberty? What is a Mind?
by Jon Rappoport
February 10, 2017
“Liberty is the child of intelligence.” (Robert Ingersoll, 1877)
A mind that can’t grasp the concept of liberty wanders in a dark asylum of illusions.
The American Constitution wasn’t written to generate passive benefits. It wasn’t a philosophic food-stamp operation.
Originally, the aim of public education was to impart an understanding of what it meant to participate in a new Republic, as a citizen, in a great experiment.
And that experiment was liberty. With responsibility.
For each individual.
Plugging in arbitrary values is not education.
“Getting everything for nothing” is not education.
During the recent UC Berkeley campus shut-down of free speech, in what was apparently a major takeaway from classes at that august University, chanting students repeated, over and over: “No borders, no nations, f*ck deportations.”
Not exactly on the level of, say, John Adams’ letters and speeches, but these are different times.
Throwing a rock through a plate glass window for no reason is now a badge of pride.
You could take the theme of “individual liberty with accountability and responsibility,” and in two weeks, with willing students, accomplish far more than most liberal arts colleges achieve in four years.
Accountability implies a person is doing something with his life, and he knows what it is.
He’s making choices—exercising his liberty—and he stands behind those choices and actions. And he can tell you why.
He’s not primarily a recipient or a beneficiary.
But there is no way you can teach liberty-plus-responsibility, or engage in a discussion about it, with a person who is determined to accrue every government freebie he can hunt down and bring to ground.
For example, suppose, just suppose you wanted to have a reasonable conversation about the enumeration of federal powers in the Constitution, and how it was intended to preserve liberty. You wanted the forum to be held at a university.
If anyone showed up at all, you’d be lucky. If people became aware of the implications of the topic, they’d protest and set fires and smash cars and demand the university cancel the event. This is called “dialogue.”
When the primary goal of education is socialization and the ruthless inculcation of “values,” the corollary is: the student’s mind must shut down when anyone questions those values.
This is the strategy of a cult.
“I can’t discuss this issue with you. I’m forbidden. And even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to understand what you’re talking about.”
That is what education has come to. That is the fate of the ambition to teach the young what it means to live and participate in a Constitutional Republic.
It is no accident. It’s not merely a random outcome. It’s the result of people taking control of the education system and using it to create disabled minds.
A disabled mind always needs help. And that is precisely the kind of society that has been on the drawing boards for over a century. The Recipient Society.
“You all need help, and we the government exist for that purpose. Forget what the Constitution says. We’ll give you what you need. In return, you pledge your support for us. Don’t leave the fold.”
If you looked around at society and made a list of 10000000 major continuing high-level crimes, and if you then eliminated them in a stroke of pure genius—but the individual never fixed himself, never became both free and responsible, you would fail. The society would keep lapsing back.
Make no mistake, those 10000000000 major crimes need to be prosecuted and eliminated, but the individual doesn’t, therefore, undergo a sudden and miraculous spiritual cure.
The individual is passive or active. He is bright or dull. He is free or enslaved. He is a dynamo or a whisper. He is free and responsible or mired and terminally dependent.
Regardless of external circumstances, he makes those choices.
One might wish this were not so, but it is so.
The enormously positive prospect is: at any moment, he can make a new and better choice.
And then everything changes.
If you’re looking for the powerful lever in human life, there it is…
There is no reason for the free and responsible individual to wait until the whole society catches up to him. That would be a losing game.
If you, engaged in inventing the future you profoundly desire, put a hold on your actions and looked around and decided you were “cheating,” because others weren’t doing for themselves what you’re doing for yourself, you would no longer be free. You would no longer be responsible to yourself.
The race to the lowest common denominator is a picture of what societies have become.
There is no reason to share in this madness.
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.
Berkeley CA 1974 – when the Viet Nam War protests were in full swing – so too was Huey Newton’s Black Panther Movement and then there was the Symbionese Liberation Army that “kidnapped” Patty Hearst and brainwashed her into carrying a gun and robbing a bank. Now instead of kidnapping students, it appears the radicals are teaching on the campus. I think the reality of jail time might work, logic won’t.
Radicals teaching on campus is hardly a new phenomenon. It was going “great guns” when I was a university student in Canada in the 1960s. This activity, left (no pun intended) to run unchecked, has continually accumulated momentum, bringing us to the current terrific clash of philosophies. In a money-motivated economy, the form society takes, in all its aspects, is ultimately determined by the financial power, which operates on monopolistic principles. Liberty (for all) in the context of a controlling monopoly is an illusion–one that through a contrived inculcated mythology Americans, in particular, are encouraged to venerate.
Liberty is, to me, realization that a benevolent higher power created and sustains every atom, life & planet in the solar system. Awakening to reality required me to evolve mentally and emotionally, gradually escaping from the ego-cage by moving from a => b => c where:
_ a.) A reptilian, fear-based survival instinct at birth
_ b.) More logical, analytical consideration of reality
_ c.) Spiritual awakening to reality of a benevolent higher power that endowed me with temporary ability to perceive, communicate and alter my surroundings over my life-time.
Oliver: The only real understanding I got from your conclusion is that you live until you die, and that living is kind of a mysterious and good thing, where you float in a sea of morally neutral surroundings which you can interact with. Sounds to me like a solipsistic “safe space.”
I agree, Greg! And, that position entirely avoids and negates the possibility of Imagination, as well as decreeing that each of us is a little nothing, temporarily endowed with understanding from an external source. Forget being a sovereign being outside the Matrix!
Right! Life is about maximizing active consciousness – not knowledge, Experiencing your own capabilities and effectiveness, knowing right from wrong and making wrong things right as you encounter them. Some people spend their days collecting arcane knowledge that proves this or that (but extremely unlikely to ever be encountered in real life), and posting what they think people should know in the comment section. Flat earth, theories about Tesla, reverse speech, whatever they think will unlock the secrets of the universe. They just don’t get it, the secret is YOU waiting to be imagined by YOU. Isn’t that what this site is all about at its core?
I don’t know what life is. I know that it has become the great scientific puzzle for Oliver to enjoy on life’s journey.
After my students and I started finding and reporting evidence the Sun made our elements, birthed the Solar System ~5 Ga ago, and sustained the origin and evolution of life on Earth after ~3.8 Ga ago, . . .
I belatedly started to awaken from an angry, arrogant atheist and dogmatic scientist to realization that my destiny is controlled by a benevolent higher power hidden in the neutron-rich pulsar core of the Sun, that is . . .
Violently and dishonestly oppose by the government’s of nations and national science academies that united under the UN on 24 Oct 1945.
I now agree that,
“To know that you don’t know is best,
To pretend to know what you do not know is a disease.”
Today I was honored to sign a petition by MIT Professor Richard S. Lindzen to
remove the US from the UNFCCC.
Thanks Oliver for continuing to share your experience. The Sun is a mystery and many old texts share many of your views. I was wondering what you think of the whole flat earth theory phenomenon that seems to have really caught alot of people’s attention.
“There is no need to share in this madness”, negates the ‘greater goods’ favorite line “we are all in this together”. The individual rejects that whole premise, that whole fantasy, the fantasy that is the life line for the power that thinks that it is.
The WE created this madness but the WE isn’t going to un create it or make it any better then it is by continuing to validate the WE over the individual, no matter how much ‘it’ tries or who ‘it’ puts in “power”.
I have been reading lately about how relationships are coming apart because of disagreement over the recently elected clowns now in charge,over the previous ones. Imagine the power that is given away to the status quo? Why wouldn’t one aspire to become president as long as the ‘we are’s’ are more important then the ‘I am’s’ around here?! …………..it beats actually having to create a living for ones self lol!!!
“There is no reason for the free and responsible individual to wait until the whole society catches up to him. That would be a losing game.”
I have spent much time trying prove to others the existence of the Matrix, and now realize that most of it (except the time spent educating my children) was wasted. People will wake up only when they have to, and that any attempt at argument is useless. It is an evolution and not everyone stands at the same point.
“The enormously positive prospect is: at any moment, he can make a new and better choice.
And then everything changes.”
I imagined there to be an alternative way to heal my daughter and found it. I have found alternative food supplies and alternative ways to educate my children.
I’m not sure, however, that I can imagine my way out of the environmental holocaust that will result from the ongoing Fukushima reactor meltdown.
I would love for Jon to address this issue.
A never-before-seen ORANGE alligator has recently been spotted in South Carolina. Of course the media immediately made light of it, tagging the creature, “The Trumpagator.”
How clever, dontcha agree? My sides are splitting from the gales of laughter this brought on. And oh yes….”Experts have no idea what might have caused this abberation….probably something environmental.”
(Insert “Duh” here.)
It’s such a friggin’ mystery. What could possibly account for a mutation of this sort?
No word on whether the reptile had a Japanese accent.
“Liberty is the child of intelligence.”
If I consider this statement as a fact, then the reason why we, human beings, do not know Liberty is clear. “Intelligence” is unable to create a complete thing, much less Liberty.
Mind… I’m not even going to enter into this matter, because this is not the best channel of communication.
Be cool!
I know life is sustained by the same source of energy that made our elements, birthed the Solar System and now sustains all lives today from the Sun’s continuously vibrating pulsar core.
NEUTRON REPULSION:
1. Is in the core of every atom heavier than 144 amu and causes spontaneous fragmentation (fission) or emission of alpha-particle (He-4);
2. Destroyed Hiroshima & Nagasaki from cores of U & Pu atoms on 6 & 9 AUG 1945;
3. Was hidden from the public by inserting Dr. Carl von Weizsacker’s flawed definition of “nuclear binding energy” into nuclear physics textbooks after frightened world leaders united nations and national academies of sciences under the UN/UNAS on 24 OCT 1945
Consciousness never exists in collectivities: people, nation, society, culture, civilization.
You will not find these things anywhere; they don’t exist.
Whenever and wherever you come across “people”, you will come across the individual. That is solid reality. And “people” can’t have any questions. The “people” don’t have any soul, the “people” is only a collective name.
It is just like a forest. From far away you can see the forest but as you come closer and closer the forest starts disappearing. When you are exactly in the forest there is no forest, there are only trees.
You will come across trees and trees and trees; unique trees, individual, having their own world; their own foliage, their own fragrance.
-Rajneesh
What is a mind that does not grasp at reality?
It is freedom without a thought of bondage.
Awareness un-separate of all it beholds.
What is a mind under possession but a seeking for liberty to complete itself?
If you would understand the already true – as not needing to be understood but simply accepted…
But your mind says it is You – and refuses to release its possession of a grasp upon reality – as if Your Life.
The mind that says it is You – also says that it/you are limited by Other – by Out There – and by Past – back when – and by future of Past re-lived again.
Liberty of the mind in ignorance of being is the drive to GET – and is the way to LACK.
Freedom operating from false principles is freedom to lie and believe it true. Do You Want this? Is this what you hate to see in Others and as your Out There?
Freedom from fear is Freedom to love – to truly feel and know and be… and so to be truly known.
Others and Out There are the means by which space and time serve to come between you and your Life – that is unseen and discarded in the mad pursuit of what you do not want.
If you are attracted to what THEY did and do to you – and to what the Past made you to be – then are you seeking to re-live the Past and remake Them to fit a desire for justice framed in vengeance and presented as victory. Exactly as ‘They’.
the entanglement of fragmented and fragmenting mind is the fascination and addiction to the ‘dynamic’ of conflict – as if victory can be had in its terms!
Freedom to abide in true being is the extension of freedom to the Movement of being within You.
The recoil from and rejection of true nature is not OF true nature – but of refusal to recognize what a false nature is convinced will expose to invalidation, denial, rejection, attack, shame, impotence, loss and pain. And so this ‘mind’ does the very thing it fears blind to its own Freedom to give and receive as one – for it cannot accept what it ‘gives’ to GET rid of. Or receive what it GETS from to be ‘free’ of.
While bondage is meaningful – aligned choice is everything. But in aligned being – the choiceless choice unfolds the creative interplay of Life lived. Nothing has to occur in order to truly and freely connect with the movement of you own being – but if You lay down conditions to be met – you put life on hold. Not really – because there is no stasis in the flow of ever changing experience – but real to the mind that seeks to force such experience to conform to and support the demands of its believed existence.
Free to challenge and question one’s own mind – is freely awakening to that you made it; it did not create You. Free to believe whatever you are moved to accept – but then to live the consequence that follows while the belief is held.
Do we ask questions to make real a framework by which to define, predict and control?
Or ask and open to receive the truth?
Beyond mind-definition, prediction or control – yet felt and moved in AS truly defining, guiding and aligning of direction and support, Without calling on coercion, deceit and sacrifice of true.
Patrick Henry said “Give me liberty or give me death.” Humans do not realize that this is exactly the choice they make every day, in seemingly insignificant ways, but like snowflakes, your choices pile up and can become an avalanche, for to reject freedom and responsibility is to reject life and be reduced to the walking dead.
When you truly know what it is to be free, and you have done the work to be and remain free, nothing can make you sell out and sacrifice this.
Is that not to motto of the binary predator mind?
Is it rhetorical nonsense?
“Give me” ???
Who is to ‘give’ ?
And who the ME?
However – is this not all a matter of such definitions?
The core spiritual awareness is that focussing and aligning in the Living is Life and focussing and aligning in the dead concept is a living lie or spiritual death.
Freedom is already ‘Given’ as the ability to discern and accept according to your will – and the qualities of consciousness, of communication and relationship that are true of you. And meet in the true of each other and our world.
The false freedom is the great work by which lies are made to seem true and true sacrificed and defended against to protect the lie. It is a work because it doesn’t come naturally, and requires immense focus and sacrifice to…. survive in such terms.
When the lie of reversal is itself reversed – then the self-betrayal of the lie can no longer be worked by deceit as blame hate and rage at the shadow ‘otherself’.
Idolising freedom is selling out.
Living freedom is teaching by demonstration.
I am free to be myself – as I extend that to you – and to uncover the truth as I release you of my judgement in willingness to receive – and to receive anew instead of holding you to your past.
Who among the dead can tolerate or abide freedom?
None!
So ‘freedom’ applied to anything becomes the mask of the denying of it. And the resort to power and deceit to defend the mask against the ‘enemies of freedom’ – who are not deserving of life and must be undermined, overcome, beaten down, worn out by any and every guise – because the mask is the freedom from what must never be allowed to re-live in open awareness – and that is the function and the charge of the power to protect from terror.
Death – the final victory – is defiance maintained to the last!
A way of life or a way of death?
It is never too late to be now.
The reversal within consciousness is characterized by a ‘me’ or self-idol to which and from which power is sacrificed to and conformed to,
When enough people become ‘stuck’ in the same place – they call it reality. The reinforcement of minds aligned in denial, renders Life invisible and Communication un-hearable.
But the idea of a fear from which to escape or demand freedom from – is easily imbibed for that is the motto or signature tune of the great evasion. Everyone ‘understands’ the rallying cry – and the mustering of charge to both deny access and project pain in the name of freedom!
The first step is to see the true from the false.
Then to embrace the true wholly and thus release the false by default.
This is the willingness of a Living Now – in place of the striving to get – or get away from.
How does this work – but one step at a time, in the day at hand – within a relational and transformational experience, of an un-covering and re-integrating being. Both intimate and infinite at once. For the limit upon your experience is your acceptance – regardless the denial of its cause.
Freedom to accept is freedom to feel, know and evolve – and freedom of creation itself. Freedom WITHIN terms of bondage is self-contradictory. The effective loss of awareness to conflicting and fragmenting dissonance and incoherence that can call on death for release and call down death to eradicate. the death urge rose from the attempt to enslave Life – in the belief one had achieved such power.
Is it true?
Do you still want it?
Jon, you wrote “For example, suppose, just suppose you wanted to have a reasonable conversation about the enumeration of federal powers in the Constitution, and how it was intended to preserve liberty. You wanted the forum to be held at a university.
If anyone showed up at all, you’d be lucky. If people became aware of the implications of the topic, they’d protest and set fires and smash cars and demand the university cancel the event. This is called “dialogue.”…..
You are absolutely right, and like Morpheus told Neo, as they looked at the zombies in the Matrix these people don’t want to wake up and they will fight to stay asleep. Until they wake up they are our enemies.
This is why I continue to stress that it is the people who have failed our Republic, and they are the reason our public servants are corrupt. It is because they are corrupt and continue to willingly participate in criminal enterprises and indoctrinate their children into slavery..
Another great article Jon. thanks for the encouragement to keep on keeping on, continue to go beyond the edges of our beliefs, and its awesome to see you on info wars!
This is not the eighteenth century, but the twenty-first. The number of industrial robots is doubling practically every year. The vision people have of making their own way in the modern economic context would be realizable only through Ludditism. If the Americans are so enraptured by the concept of the independent individual that they are prepared to annul the advantages of cooperative endeavor (reserving the right to contract out of endeavor with which they disagree) then they will be consigning themselves to economic irrelevance. There was a time when people aspired to acquire culture rather than to flip hamburgers. If the principle of generalized inheritance was applied in the modern world–not handouts at the whims of politicians and bureaucrats–then we could lift ourselves out of the current morass of stagnation and division, which offers only gloomy prospects.
Lots of interesting stuff here, Jon.
Do those that write constitutions necessarily uphold the corporeal interests of all?
I think not. Constitutions are “loaded documents” that craft nationalistic divides. Hence, the “judiciary” and “common law” was “meant” to only ever be “guided” by a constitution.
Those behind the “one race” nonsense are behind this. That is the only “justification” for no nations.
“We are all the same”.
Rubbish. If that was so there would be no need to for constitutions, judiciaries and laws.
I could go on, but time is pressing right now.
Best
OT
It’s true that America seems to be dramatically “dumbing down”. I hear news that shocks me of peoples’ pettiness and irresponsibility. As you pointed out, they just go with societal trends rather than taking the time for any serious deep thinking.