IS CHOOSING TO BE A VICTIM A TABOO SUBJECT?

By Jon Rappoport

November 1, 2012

www.nomorefakenews.com

Some people apparently think there are no fake victims, only real ones.

They believe that if all the oppression in the world were magically lifted tomorrow, people would suddenly become independent.

I don’t believe that. I raise these issues because I think it’s time for some honest input.

When I went to junior high school (it wasn’t “middle school” then, and “junior” wasn’t considered a dangerous pejorative that could ruin young minds), the concept of a victim, as we use it now, didn’t exist.

Can you imagine it? There was no special ed. There were no federal funds paid out for each “specially abled” child. No one used the word “victim.” There was no such thing as ADHD. There was no such thing as a clinically depressed child. There were no shrinks hovering around ready to make diagnoses and dispense drugs.

This junior high had a cross-section of kids from different economic and ethnic backgrounds. There were rich kids, middle-class kids, and poor kids. There were white kids and black kids. There were Italian kids and Jewish kids and WASP kids.

Did cruel things occasionally happen? Were there a few bullies? Yes. Was it paradise every day? No. Were there injustices? Yes. But all in all, it was a good school. Kids learned. Kids had fun. Most of the teachers were fair and just.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, more learning took place in that school than in a comparable school today. It wasn’t even close, by any reasonable standard of measurement, like literacy.

And in terms of the kids feeling safe and free (as free as anyone can be in a school), again it was no contest. Things were better then than they are now.

The word victim was never used. Kids didn’t wear victimhood like a badge. It didn’t take a village. We didn’t have the incomparable advantage of knowing we were all on Spaceship Earth, and yet we did well.

We somehow managed to struggle through without being taught about sex in the classroom. No one told us about the need to respect every point of view. In fact, there was no social training at all. We never sat around in class and had group discussions with the teacher.

We all knew the principal was an idiot. We knew who the bad teachers were and who the good teachers were. The good teachers just taught their subjects.

By today’s standards, we were living in the Stone Age. Yet, we got through it. We weren’t ever treated as victims, and we didn’t know what victims were. Kids understood they either succeeded or failed. If they failed, they didn’t make it to the next grade. It was stark and simple. No one objected.

Yes, in some respects, school was a real pain in the neck, but we bit the bullet and kept on going.

If someone from the future had showed up and told us about ADHD and what it was, and what the drugs were, we would have called him crazy. We would have laughed him into oblivion.

Flash forward 60 years…

“Oh, but now there are so many more distractions. TV, computers, the Internet, cell phones. And drugs, porn, divorced parents, guns, junk food, advertising. Kids today need more help. They need more caring adults.”

No, actually, kids need schools where the rules are simple and stark. You learn or you don’t learn. You behave or you don’t behave. You aren’t a victim.

Over the last 60 years, a culture of victimhood has become a major industry. This culture, as it turns out, doesn’t really solve very much at all. It engenders more problems. It invents endless excuses. It piles up bullshit to the level of every kid’s eyes. It gives a kid an out.

The people who promote victimhood make their living by promoting victimhood. That’s the clue. They’re hustlers.

There are a few fuzzy boundaries when you differentiate between a real victim and a phony one. It isn’t perfect. Nothing is. There is no system that can protect everybody. But, all in all, you’re far better off unloading the victim culture than you are expanding it.

And expanding it is what happens when the pros and hustlers take over. They’re liars right down to their shoes.

Parents are complicit. They’re looking for an out, too. They want to have outside people make sure their kids are all right.

It all comes down to this: if you perceive that society has become a bad place for your family, for you, do you insist that everything has to be changed before you can thrive, or do you take the bull by the horns? Do you choose victimhood, or do you choose independence?

In recent months, we’ve learned that the federal government and its allies consider people who are against central authority a potential threat.

Translation: if you don’t go along with the culture of victimhood, you’re a monkey wrench in the machinery of progress. You’re standing up for yourself. You’re not absolutely relying on outside sources to solve your problems.

Once upon a time, self-reliance was a given. In order for it to be a given, there had to be a concomitant principle: if you don’t rely on yourself, you’re going to be in trouble. The two ideas go together.

People accepted this.

You pass your courses or you fail and repeat the grade.

That wasn’t considered an onerous burden. It was a fact of life.

Then, there was a change. “I” was replaced by “we.” That was the “new idea.” It sounded good. It sounded interesting. It sounded hopeful.

But it was a con. The “we” was fake. It wasn’t about cooperation in a family or in a real community. It was high-flying and political. It was vague.

It was an out. It was a way to choose victimhood. In fact, it became, over time, a way for voluntary victims to bond with one another. “We’re all in this together, we’re in bad shape, and we need help.”

And help arrived. It arrived, along many fronts, in the form of the removal of the need to be a strong individual.

That was the key in the lock that opened the door, so the old culture of self-reliance could flow into the sea and disappear.

“But there are real victims!” people say. Of course there are. Since there are oppressors, there are victims. But I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about that at all. I’m talking about choice, about choosing to enter the dim realm of the put-upon.

And if you don’t think many, many people have made that choice, you’re not watching. In fact, there is a good chance you’re just glazing over inside the vast culture of victimhood and letting it wash over you.

There’s a chance you’re letting your own power drip away, and you don’t really care.

When I was in ninth grade, my teacher told us what deus ex machina meant. God from the machine. It was a dramatic device through which, in a play, the characters were rescued from their terrible troubles, at the last minute, from Above. It was a cheap trick.

Well, there are millions of people who, after choosing victimhood, have come to believe in deus ex machina. One way or another, the cavalry will come over the hill. They count on this. The cosmic lottery ticket will turn up.

Just wait long enough, and the payoff will appear.

This has NOTHING to do with cooperation in small groups or families. It has everything to do with a gathering malaise. It has everything to do with the expanding culture of victimhood.

My father grew up in the Bronx. When he was 11, his father died. My father had to quit school. He was then the head of the family, which included his mother and sister and his younger brother.

Helped to learn how to look out for himself by a private charity, he found a job sweeping floors in a textile factory. He eventually moved up the ladder and became the chief salesman and designer and a partner in the firm.

For a number of years, he was a staunch socialist. But eventually, he said, he realized that forcing everyone to be equal didn’t work. Some people would always game the system. Some people would always find a way to make the system stronger and the individual weaker. Some people would use the system to give a leg up to their cronies.

Worse than any of this, a whole culture would emerge, a culture designed to provide people with a way to fall back on their weakest instincts, a culture that would eventually become violent and vicious, because it would encourage massive self-esteem based on nothing.

Combine that culture with rampant obsessive consumerism and you have a volatile mix that destroys minds.

And there is a ready excuse for every shortfall, an excuse for every shortcoming and every crime—with parasitic intellectuals inventing newer and newer reasons to exonerate all behaviors everywhere, under the flag of tolerance and understanding and even freedom.

Do we need liberation from oppressive criminals and their systems? Of course. Do we need liberation from our own individual self-diminishing surrender to passivity?

More than ever.

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. 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 www.nomorefakenews.com

THE TYRANNY OF “WHAT ALREADY EXISTS”

by Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com

OCTOBER 24, 2012. We want to know what exists. We want to know it at the bottom of the sea and out in the stars and within our own minds and in realms outside the normal channels of perception. Of course we want to journey to those places and find out what’s there.

We search for design and pattern and structure and system, in order to reach the highest kind of knowledge about existence.

We need to add a different platform.

Design, structure, system, and shape are not the end of the voyage. They are objectives that serve lesser goals. They are real and very useful and fine and good—but they are limited.

People who are obsessed with What Exists don’t see that. They think the structure and system are the grandest end-points.

This obsession is a deep part of human programming. When operating at full-bore, it obscures the farther shore.

It absorbs people with magnetic force.

It limits power.

When the goal of discovering-what-exists takes over to the point of obsession, it forms a mesh of reality that surrounds us.

It is the meta-program that allows the matrix to have strength.

It is the input that keeps the whole matrix humming.

It’s interesting to reflect on those three famous Matrix films, and how they disintegrate step by step, from the discovery of the reality-prison—and the rush of adrenaline which ensues—on to the mindless war—as if that kind of struggle will actually free anyone.

The collapse of the storyline mirrors what happens when the impulse to see through to the Final Structure tries to continue past that point: there is nowhere to go.

Why? Because the heroes are really only armed with the all-consuming desire to uncover What Exists. Beyond that, they are clueless.

There is something about that voyage that degrades like an element with a very short half-life. It sputters out. The heroes revert back to older, more basic programming. Fight, conquer territory, defend, attack.

One: the thrill of profound discovery. Two: then the feeling of vacuum and confusion. Three: then the reversion back to primitive hatreds. With that sequence—now you are talking about the real Matrix.

In the arena of genetic research, there is the hope that, someday, we will find a gene which will somehow “wake up” all the dormant circuits in the brain—and then we will gain back fantastic insight and power. But based on what scientists have so far unearthed, is there any reason to believe this? Or is it just one more illusion which propels us forward on the voyage of discovery?

Literature, plays, films, and television are littered with stories that contain a mystery—and at the end comes the payoff, when the mystery is solved, when we find out What Exists.

For a moment, the audience is absorbed, and then there is the let down.

It’s as if a voyage through a rich forest suddenly ended in a vacuum, in a Nothing.

As long as the secret and the mystery can be prolonged, as long as What Exists can be postponed, you have the audience with you. But when the solution is revealed, all you have is the thirst for another mystery. “Tell us more! Tell us another one! Give us another puzzle!”

An ancient manuscript, an unexplored cave, a probe sent to a distant planet…there is a powerful desire to come to the punch line…and then…boredom edges in.

I once had a conversation with a modern guru in the field of self-improvement. He is a very successful author and lecturer. At one point, he said, essentially: You know, I have nothing left. I’ve written these books, I’ve told my audiences what they need to know. They keep wanting more. The next book, the next lecture. I’m tired. I don’t have any more secrets. They don’t really want to know what works in their lives. They want stories. They want the thrill of the hunt for the next big thing. But when they get it, I can see them go over the edge into depression…

It’s a paradox. People want to massage a secret, they want it to be solved and yet, when it’s solved, they don’t care anymore. But if you give them a real secret, one that doesn’t resolve, one that challenges them in a different way, they throw up their hands and give up. They claim they “don’t understand.”

Several years ago, I went to the Vatican, to the Sistine Chapel, to see the Michelangelo fresco. I sat in the room with several hundred other visitors. We all craned our necks, looking at the famous ceiling. I’m sure that for many of those people, it was the fulfillment of a dream: to finally witness the greatness of one of the most famous works of art on the planet.

Afterwards, outside in the corridor, I watched them leave. What I saw on their faces was a neutrality tinged with boredom.

The mystery was solved. They had seen the thing in person, finally. They had found out What Exists. It was the end.

I’m sketching here the anatomy of The Voyage to Discover What Exists.

It is one of the great enduring passions. But it has a vast and gaping downside. The payoff melts into a sagging passivity. “Well, that’s over. What’s next?”

Remember the Mike Nichols film, The Graduate? In that middle-class drama, the young Benjamin goes to extreme lengths to win Elaine, the daughter of Mrs. Robinson. He storms into Elaine’s wedding; she deserts her fiancee. Outside the church, Ben and Elaine catch a bus and take their seats in the back. As the film ends, Ben just sits there. He has captured the prize. He stares vaguely at nothing. No joy. Only a blank.

Here is a statement attributed to Nobel Laureate Albert Szent- Gyorgyi (1937 Prize for Physiology and Medicine): “In my search for the secret of life, I ended up with atoms and electrons, which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line, life has run out through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am now retracing my steps…”

Something that appears so right and so real and so entrancing, the attempt to nail down What Exists, has such a strange result.

What is going on?

How many seekers after the grand conspiracy behind all conspiracies become bogged down in their own journey, especially after they believe they have the answers to their ultimate questions? How many travelers along this road decide their findings add up to a portrait of a hopeless locked-down future, from which no one can escape—and then give up the whole enterprise in disgust and disillusionment?

How many people will fall into a weary swamp after December 21, 2012 (the fabled end of the Mayan calendar), passes and the revelation, the secret they have been chasing, doesn’t yield up the kind of personal illumination they were counting on?

Many years ago, a friend told me about a UFO cult that had existed somewhere in the Midwest, in the 1920s. The leader informed her followers that a great ship was coming to take them all away to a better place, a wonderful planet. The date and time were set. The leader had been receiving instructions from alien ET guides.

On this basis, all the members of the cult sold their houses and belongings (as if money would be useful on Planet X?). On the appointed date, the group was sitting in room, waiting for the ship to arrive. After several delays, the leader emerged from another room and said the UFO guides had just told her they weren’t coming after all, because the catastrophe that was supposed to decimate Earth had been sidetracked and avoided.

So there they were, sitting in a room, all dressed up with nowhere to go (and nowhere to live).

The result? The effort at recruiting new members expanded, and the cult grew! The leader told them a new story about what was coming in the wonderful years ahead—a new mystery was in progress.

THE OBSESSION TO DISCOVER WHAT EXISTS.

What Exists is, on a significant level, the greatest con game ever invented.

Everyone wants to chase down WHAT EXISTS and reveal it.

If Jesus really survived the crucifixion or was never hung on the cross, and escaped the Middle East, and if he married and had children, and if those children had children, and if that bloodline still exists…

Ten or 20 years after this “great secret is exposed”…how many of the millions of people who were originally galvanized by it still care or think about it….it’s old hat…we want another story…tell us another story….

Well, here is a different story:

The human being was placed in a universe that appeared to beg for discovery of its secrets.

The die was cast. Humans would forever try to satisfy that hunger.

They would never suspect there was another way. They would never graduate, through a fundamental shifting of gears, up on to another echelon.

They would never guess that you have to game the system that is rigged to defeat you.

You have to turn the con around.

If things (life) are designed to subvert you…BECOME A DESIGNER.

If What Exists proves to be an endless labyrinth, landing you, finally, back at the starting gate…INVENT WHAT EXISTS.

If reality is created to gobble you up in a voyage for answers and solutions…CREATE REALITY.

Turn the tables.

Move beyond only discovering What Exists, and recognize that voyage was the primary reason you kept yourself in the dark about your own creative power.

Understand, once and for all, that every system is another version of What Exists…they are murals you attach yourself to like barnacles on a ship.

Freedom is the platform from which imagination can spread out infinitely.

The universe is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core.

…I call them the SOB People. In this case, SOB stands for State of Being. You may recall that the verb “to be” and all its forms is labeled “the state of being” verb. It expresses no action.

It’s about Is. It’s about What Exists.

The SOB People love What Exists. They pray at that altar every day.

The SOB People look at imagination as an activity like the re-arranging of deck chairs. For them, nothing new ever occurs. Invention merely puts together what is already known. Invention takes ideas and images and fits them together in different ways. The present is only a redistribution of the past.

They are married forever to What Exists. They stake out their territory there. “Nothing new under the sun.” They take pride in this view. They think it makes them very wise.

Actually it deteriorates their lives and energy one drop at a time.

In their graves and beyond, they keep mouthing, “What Already Exists, What Already Exists, What Already Exists.”

A conversation with an SOB Person can be like talking to a meat grinder. When you emerge at the other end, you want to jump into a pool and drown.

Teachers in writing classes and seminars often tell their students, “Write about what you know.” This pearl has stalled large numbers of aspiring authors. I would tell them, “Write about anything you want to—especially what you don’t know.”

From the perspective of ordinary reality, imagination is all about what is impossible. If that sounds like a koan, chew on it for a while.

Imagination is that faculty that can raise the dead.

Imagination can give rise to the spontaneous creation of what has never been before.

Imagination shifts the whole emphasis of living from the discovery of What Exists to the creation of something new, a new reality(ies).

Imagination decimates the entire library of human programming.

With imagination, you aren’t buying a story; you’re inventing countless numbers of stories.

But this invention isn’t just aimless ruminating—you create something new, you express something new, and you propel it into the world.

Without that, you float in a sea of gauze.

Of course, there is fear of the New.

People think something terrible might happen if they invent something new. Their friends might ridicule them. The whole universe might suddenly collapse. Their minds might shred.

This is where human programming really bites hard. This programming assumes and asserts that, with enough voyaging, with enough discovery, one can find the Ultimate, one can find “everything that needs to be found.”

Whereas the truth is: you can create infinitely.

AND WHAT YOU CREATE IS NEW.

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. 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 www.nomorefakenews.com

MIND FREEDOM, MIND BEAUTY

By Jon Rappoport

September 27, 2012

www.nomorefakenews.com

Official science doesn’t really care about your experience or perception. It cares about its own paradigm.

That paradigm, in order to work, excludes your subjective knowledge.

Two basic questions are eliminated from scientific exploration: what is freedom and what is mind?

A strange embrace among the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and academic philosophy has blocked an understanding of the mind.

Prior to 1970, the discipline of psychology considered several interesting models of mind. Then, psychiatry, struggling to survive in the face of declining public interest, hatched a staggering deal with the pharmaceutical empire.

Drug companies would bankroll the profession of psychiatry as never before. Conferences, research grants, journals, professorships, advertising, PR—money would pour in.

On their part, psychiatric researchers would be obliged to publish studies that “proved” all mental disorders stemmed from chemical imbalances in the brain; these imbalances could be remedied by new drugs. Naturally, Pharma would develop and sell such drugs.

From that moment on, adventurous theories about mind went begging. As far as “science” was concerned, mind was nothing more than the brain. A severely limited materialist view of human life moved solidly to center stage.

It was soon bolstered by a new generation of computer devotees, who assumed that mind was merely an apparatus that functioned on the basis of hardware/software applications—and any notions of individual freedom were possibly delusions “built into the equipment” or bugs that needed to be found and scrubbed away.

It was assumed that only “professionals” had the necessary tools to investigate the mind, and anything a layperson might discover or say about the subject was as important as a street sweeper speculating on nuclear physics.

As a student of philosophy at Amherst College in the late 1950s, I was exposed to a series of sophistries that attempted to skirt the whole question of individual freedom, substituting instead two major premises:

Human beings could only know what they could see with their eyes and measure; it was permissible to continue talking about freedom as if it existed, but this permission was simply an acknowledgment that language consisted of all sorts of quirky habits, and it might be useful to catalog those quirks, like sub-species of butterflies, as long as one didn’t take their meaning seriously.

I wasn’t pleased by either of these admonitions. I’d entered the field of philosophy because I felt freedom was a vital thing, and I sensed it was being attacked on many fronts.

As I wended my way through college, I became aware of the odd fact that, while the philosophy department was doing all it could to avoid squarely facing the issue of individual freedom, the political science department was assigning students original-source material on the founding of the American Republic.

This material (the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers), of course, was deeply engaged in establishing freedom as an incontrovertible principle.

When I inquired about the obvious contradiction at the College, I was told it was “one of those inter-departmental differences” that was unavoidable. After all, what should political scientists do? Teach nothing about freedom?

As a young and inexperienced student, 50-plus years ago, I thought perhaps a professor in the psychology department might be able to clear up the confusion.

A practicing therapist on campus fielded my questions and said, “Freedom really isn’t our issue. We want to understand how the mind operates.” He went on to say that the goal of therapy was “happiness and adjustment.”

That pretty much ended my adventure of learning in college. Fortunately, life isn’t college.

Three years after I left Amherst, I was living in Los Angeles, and I had a small studio where I was painting. One night (and I can see this very clearly), I was sitting at my table. There was a piece of blank paper in front of me. To my left, there was a box of oil crayons. I was looking at the sheet of paper, wondering what I might draw on it, when suddenly, and for no discernible reason, I knew that I had the freedom to draw anything.

Sounds silly. But this was not an intellectual observation. Of course I or anyone else can draw anything. That isn’t news. No, this was something much deeper and more expansive. It was as if some interior space, in my mind, a space I’d never realized existed before, made its presence known. And the essence and core of that space was freedom. Was liberation. Was an unbounded and direct knowing about freedom. That space imparted to me one of the most immediate feelings of freedom I’ve ever had. It was luxurious and adventurous and intensely exhilarating. And it came out of nowhere.

The feeling lasted for about a minute, and then it slowly faded away. Ever since that moment, I’ve remembered that, whenever politicians or their allies are obviously trying to discount or dump freedom, when they are trying to sell some substitute, when they are raising some phony banner under which we’re all supposed to march toward our collective destiny…I’ve remembered that freedom is REAL and it has to be defended. To do otherwise would betray a fantastic quality of the space we call Mind.

I’ve also known that freedom isn’t just an effect of a cause, like one billiard ball moving into a pocket after being hit by another ball; it isn’t one electron being kicked by another electron. If freedom can be said to be anywhere, it’s behind all the cause-and-effect activity of matter and energy. Freedom isn’t just another event in a long chain of events; it’s free.

Obviously, I don’t know what your experience of freedom has been. But I’d be willing to bet that, as a child, you had moments and even hours where, perhaps, playing in a field or on the street, you realized you were free and alive and something apart from any restricted, pinched, limited existence.

The feelings you felt were enormous and ecstatic. You understood, at a level no one could challenge, what life was about.

And yet, this is nowhere reflected in the approved studies of psychiatry, psychology, or academic philosophy. It’s discounted as “anecdotal” and spurious and even delusional.

Having a tremendous and stunning experience of freedom might qualify you for psychiatric help. It appears we’re heading in that direction.

These days, many mainstream brain researchers will insist that freedom is nothing more than a “thought generated by brain activity,” no more important than any other thought.

If you’re looking to explain how technocrats can possibly envision a world in which humans are only cogs in a machine, you’ve found the answer. These scientists refuse to admit that freedom is real. As bizarre as this sounds, it’s true. To them we’re all already cogs in a machine. They just want to change the arrangement, the configuration of parts.

You see, and this is where philosophy pokes its head into the fray, to say that freedom is real is to acknowledge that it lies beyond all formulations and theories of cause and effect. And such a confession would torpedo the authoritarian and privileged status of modern science.

No, you say, this couldn’t be true, everybody knows that freedom exists. Everybody knows that you can choose A or B. You can make decisions about your future. I’m sorry to say, not everybody knows this—and the disturbing thing is, the people who are doing the most advanced research on the brain, the kind of research that could shape and fence in our future world, quite definitely do not know freedom exists.

Freedom and “mind independent of the brain” are, to them, maddening little questions they want to get rid of. They want to sweep them under the carpet. They want to chart and map every possible action of the brain and then, inevitably, make those changes in it they deem proper “for the good of All.”

So, first on the list of things I would recommend is, take inventory of your own experience. Remember moments when, beyond your normal level of daily consciousness, you experienced freedom directly and powerfully. No filters. No intellectual assumptions. Just undeniable encounters.

Why? Because you need to know what you are defending when you defend freedom against attack. Yes, freedom is the right to choose your life. Yes, it’s the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Yes, it’s all those assertions in the Bill of Rights. Yes, the Constitution delineates what the central government can and can’t do. Yes, we know that. But then there is YOU. There is your existence. There is your experience of freedom. Those times, those moments when you felt it so strongly you were thrilled to your core to be alive.

That is natural freedom. That is mind freedom. That is why the founding documents of the Republic have any meaning. They flow from something that is already there, in each one of us. A potential that is already there.

And if you forget that, you defend freedom for an incomplete reason.

I knew a man in his late forties whose life was a complete mess. This was a man you wouldn’t want to be around. He somehow managed to turn every conversation and situation in his life into an unsolvable problem. He annoyed everyone he came into contact with. He was one of those “difficult people,” and his life was falling apart at the seams. He couldn’t hold a job for more than a few months. His bosses would fire him for any reason they could. Anything to get him out the door. He was a classic self-created victim.

In an act of desperation, he went on a vegetarian diet, without really believing it would do any good. It didn’t. He persisted for a month or two, and then he scraped together enough money to go to a spa where he could stay for two weeks and do yoga and fast on fruits and vegetables.

In his second week at the spa, he was walking from yoga class to his room, and suddenly, as he told me, he “felt his body was well-oiled and elastic.” He felt as if he were 10 years old again, on summer vacation from school, with unbounded possibilities stretching out in front of him.

In a matter of moments, his entire framework of unending complaints vanished without a trace. It left no residue in its wake. He could clearly contemplate what he most wanted to do with his life, and he could see his way to achieving it. His sense of grappling with a bottomless inscrutable problem was gone.

This feeling lasted a few days. But even after it dissolved, he was positioned in a new way. He dropped his “whole act,” as he put it. He went on to launch a career, and he made it a success.

A bookish woman in her 30s, who had never worked at a job she enjoyed, decided to sell cars. She got a job at a dealership in Southern California, and after a month she was coming up empty on sales. She saw no chance of breaking through.

Her manager pulled her into his office and suggested she try something a little easier. He helped get her a job in a large store selling home appliances.

Her first day at the store, she swore to herself she would do more to connect with prospective customers. She would treat them “as if they were real people,” she said. Forgetting about landing immediate sales, she made a herculean effort to “climb out of her cave” and chat with people in the store.

After two days, she felt a surge of energy, as if she’d come alive in a new way. For the first time in memory, she was relating to strangers.

The feeling lasted for a month, during which she incidentally racked up many sales. She described her state of mind as “completely open and free,” as if she’d cracked through a barrier.

She quit her job, enrolled at a college, and eventually got her degree in architecture.

I tell these stories because, in each case, the experience of freedom was intense and life-changing, and because the people came to it in radically different ways.

Freedom exists.

It can be drawn out of hiding. It can be felt beyond any structure or pattern, and it most certainly doesn’t depend on permission granted by a government or Official Science.

One can’t explain these experiences by citing specific brain activity. Freedom isn’t a brain phenomenon. It isn’t a delusion. One might say the reverse: everything except freedom is a delusion or the result of oppression.

People tend to believe the mind is either a trap or a “device” for thinking. It can certainly be those things, but it is also a gateway into freedom.

Mind is a kind of space dotted with familiar outposts we visit. Each outpost is a collection of feelings, ideas, preferences, and aversions. We move from one outpost to another, looking for a way out, a way to go beyond our present state.

Then, something unforeseen happens. On our way to a particular outpost for the thousandth time, we make a detour, and we arrive at a spot that contains of none of those feelings, ideas, preferences, or aversions. Instead, we are in a gorgeously empty place. And being there, we experience a joy that expands. We experience ourselves in a natural state.

We know we are free.

Everyone is entitled and equipped to explore what this means because, after all, we aren’t simply talking about a generalized notion; we’re talking about intimate knowledge of what we are.

This is not the province of science. It’s the wide open territory of self. It’s more real than real.

We can become discouraged. We can become cynical. We can lower our expectations and options. But we can’t ultimately avoid what we are. Coming to grips with that is our destiny, as much as motion is the destiny of the body.

The elites who, increasingly, run this planet long ago abandoned any search for their own freedom as individuals. They falsely believe they’re already there. That’s what they keep telling themselves, and that’s why they feel compelled to control everything they can. Control is a substitute for freedom. It’s a false card in the deck. It’s the iron mask that hides the truth. It’s a drug that can induce amnesia about the existence of freedom. It’s the ultimate expression of self-denial.

Before psychiatry, brain research, and pharmaceutical empire-building crowded out truly independent research on the mind, there were two great 20th-century psychologists. They both understood freedom and sought it with stunning intensity. Wilhelm Reich, a breakaway student of Freud, was arrested and put in jail, where he died. JL Moreno, the founder of Psychodrama, was largely ignored by the Freudians coming into power.

In his autobiography, Moreno recounts a 1912 encounter: “I attended one of Freud’s lectures…As the students filed out, he singled me out from the crowd and asked me what I was doing. I responded, ‘Well, Dr. Freud, I start where you leave off…You analyze [patients’] dreams. I give them the courage to dream again…’”

The dream is about freedom. Experiencing it. Creating a life from it.

Taking instructional cues from media about what emotions we are supposed to invest and project into images (mass mind control), we discover that the list of emotions is rather short. It’s stunted. Not only are we supposed to respond with these feelings, we’re all taught we have to “share” them. If we don’t, we’re looked at as strange, as outsiders.

But when we experience freedom directly, we immediately realize such feelings are misplaced. They’re props in a bad play. What we feel when we are standing in the middle of our own freedom is beyond labels. It’s another level of mind. Perhaps it’s beyond mind entirely.

In the old stories of Zen masters, we find teachers who put irrational pressures on students until the “catalog of familiar emotional outposts” in their minds blew apart. At that moment, the students experienced “satori,” which roughly means “seeing into one’s true nature.”

What is that nature? Is it a particular thing, a prior established thing…or is it really freedom?

If it’s freedom, then the world suddenly appears as unending possibility.

Isn’t that what we really want? Isn’t that part and parcel of what we remember, when we reflect on past moments when we felt truly alive?

There is nothing esoteric about this. It is stripping off a layer of fabricated synthetic substance, and finding underneath the ecstatic energy that was always there, waiting for us to return from our long strange trip.

Our nature is to be free.

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. 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.

www.nomorefakenews.com