Censorship

I believe the patronizing brand of censorship Kel Campbell has written about in her amazingly smart and funny style the most important human issue to understand. Censorship is THE ultimate method for an individual or group to take power over other individuals or groups. Here is how she ended her essay:

“There has to be a very fundamental basic for feminism that we can all agree on; something that regardless of race, class, experiences and beliefs that we can get behind. And if allowing women to discuss their life experiences — good, bad or ugly — is not at the top of the list, what are we even doing?”

I totally agree with Kel and am about to test drive her wish because I am about to discuss a topic even more off limits to unqualified negative commentary than the vagina. The topic is yoga, eastern religions, the Self Help Industrial Complex, spiritual intuitives, energy healers, and much of what psychology has to offer. My life experiences have shown me the hard way that palatable sounding non-empirically based information entraps and censors us just as insidiously as patriarchal religions do.

My experience is that I escaped the Billy Graham and Gerry Falwells of the world only to run straight into their liberal counterparts: yoga swamis, Buddhist monks, therapists who infantilized me, and spirit channeling Hay House authors.

I have learned censorship can be fire and brimstone and it can be love drenched rhetoric. As a young woman I was totally gullible to the many slick scientific sounding spiritual and intuitive energy healer types out there. They were waiting for me to turn 20 something so they could prey on my inexperience and vulnerability. They were waiting to take my money because it was their sacred calling to ‘help’ me for money. They had to convince me I needed their help and healing powers, and boy did they convince me.

Successful censorship practices sway how a person understands and interprets information. Understanding and interpreting information is the only active role a human plays in her life as a mammal, so usurping control over how information is understood and managed is total power.

Catholicism fed me inaccurate, confusing, and destabilizing information about why I was born, what purpose I should establish for my life, how I should interpret, wrestle with, and subdue my various biological cues, and how I should interpret the expressions of other people. Catholic misinformation for decades censored my ability to accurately understand myself as a human being who was born with fully functional and dependable biological cues. I managed to doggedly fight and scratch myself free from Catholic misinformation but was quickly re-imprisoned and censored by well-meaning but equally destabilizing psychological and new -age thought controllers.

It took me 50 years to figure this out, but now that I have, I feel I was let out of a maze of prisons I was not supposed to get out of. A fluke incident showed me just how effective sugary sweet, love-drenched censorship can be. Censorship works simply by convincing me to believe something is true for made up reasons.

Here is some of the censoring misinformation I have gained freedom from. I am free from non-empirically derived psychological concepts passed off as scientific facts, concepts like the mostly disempowering notions of self-esteem, character, mood, and temperament. I am free from Yoga Sutras and the Yoga Swamis who channel them because I now realize they are every bit as patronizing and inhibitory as the bible and its prophets are. I am free from believing anyone or anything is divine. I am free from the words soul, spirit, and open-hearted. I am free from the tactics in which these words are used to manipulate me into buying products and services. I now use anatomically specific and accurate language to talk about my brain and body because too many pretty words have been used to passive aggressively convince me I needed to be healed or my heart and soul needed to be opened or my spirit needed to be freed.

I now exist free from both liberal AND conservative ideologies, ideologies that for 50 long years prevented me from knowing I am a competent, capable, fully functioning biological organism just by virtue of having been born a human.

Information is the most powerful tool and potential weapon available to us as humans. When I was swayed to believe some people have special powers to know special psychological information, intuit special love information, or channel special divine information, I was in need of those people to show me and tell me how to be, largely because these special people told me I could not be fully functioning without their special information.

The far right believes they have special information from Jesus. Jesus has tells them through prophets what women can and cannot with their bodies. I am uncomfortable with this situation. I am also uncomfortable with the new age version of this. Why did I balk at being told how to understand and treat my reproductive organs but then turn around and let intuitive spiritual healers channel information to me about how I should open my heart, free my spirit, and lead a more fulfilling life by engaging in practices channel by a different set of ancient prophets?

I think I was able to break free from specific Christian information, but was unable to break free from the paradigm that packaged the Christian information. I literally didn’t know I could navigate life decisions competently with my own biological equipment because I so firmly believed I was born inadequate to the task of being human. Instead of questioning this fact, I looked for new age healer types to fix me because they sounded better than the Christian representatives.

Maybe this is just me. I have no idea how I would have reacted to this essay had someone else written it 20 years ago. I would have been reading it in yoga pants with a credit card maxed out to Hay House in the pocket. I would have likely just arrived from a workshop telling me how to open my heart so I could discover the authentic version of myself. I would have been stuck in the patronizing and passive aggressive teaching that I needed to do tons of work on myself to uncover who I REALLY was. I would have still believed the passive aggressive idea that only the most dogged spiritual seekers become the authentic version of who they were ‘meant to be.’

I am now a science loving geek who needs evidence to believe or not believe in anything.

Had I read an essay like this 20 years ago, it might have saved me tons of time and money, but I don’t think I would have agreed with it. I had been fed too much psychologically and spiritually based information by then that had me convinced I needed mega help to heal me and unlock my true potential. Chances are I probably wouldn’t even have finished reading this essay. Maybe it would have helped me break free sooner than I did.

In any event, agree with me or not, I appreciate the forum to express.