Celebrating Independence?
The States of America is no longer united.
Political theorists forebode an impending civil war. Texas trying to secede from the union is the thin edge of the wedge for what’s to come. Activists are distracted by dystopian shifts from tyranny under the guise of a republic. We’re stripped of our liberty in the night, blood running cold in disbelief. Smoke and mirrors, the activists still shout about voting; they miss the core of the problem. When they take away the most basic human right, we only imagine a fix within the confines of the system. We draw lines in the sand, only to have them washed away once the next act of irreversible damage strikes again. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, week after week. Mobilizing is exhaustion, like herding cats — so we take it lying down, wallowing in fear, confusion, hate, and rage only to find comfort in defeatist memes that promote the apocalypse.
We put our trust in parties, demonizing each other, and playing right into the hands of those who spin the yarn. The government disguises mass control with panic laws deemed to protect us, shrouded in federally controlled institutions, filthy with biased science. We demand that the government take our guns, whilst the storms of war are at our doorstep. Like a raindrop in a drought, we wait in ignorance, weal, and woe, pretending things will ever return to a state of bilateral peace. We focus the discussion on sides of parties and their ideological stances, failing to see that dollar signs motivate the elected regardless. We’re fiddling while Rome burns over meaningless nuances, fighting tooth and nail only to establish our patriotism to a social cause or our deep-seated beliefs. We get upset and wait 4 more years to never be content as things move even further from our subjective idea of progress, widening the gap of polarity to an extremity unseen before. Withering on the vine, 2024 will be the last year of democracy as we know it. Which liberty will be taken from us next and which one will be handed over willingly?
We are so deeply rooted in the system, that a path out seems like a hopeless and overwhelming dilemma. We’ve crossed the Rubicon and any subtle move forward just cuts both ways. There seems to be no silver bullet in which salvation hides. What can we really do?
We rely on the government for medicine, when medicine was traditionally enshrined to the people. We rely on them for food, when we used to grow our own. We rely on their system of distributed labor to function in their highly complex society. We rely on other corporations and outside labor to provide us the most basic human needs to exist, paid for with reward-based vouchers called “money”, earned by offering up our own time, energy, efforts, and physical labor. To simplify — they grant us the right to live by turning us into slaves. There’s only one group that knows which side their bread is buttered and they lead us up the garden path by shuffling around the mechanics of the system. They sugar the pill to make us think it’s in our own hands. From time immemorial, the system has been in place for so long that we’ve forgotten it’s a system and come to see it only as a way of life. We fail to get anything done ourselves as the riches of comfort poison us from every direction. Diverted by the ladder of Mammon, we find that the milk and honey are only another rung higher so we must keep climbing. We lack the time, energy, and discipline to take care of ourselves because we’re distracted by system-based problems — unnatural, but necessary for maintenance when so absorbed in the system itself. Yet in the age of information, we have all the appropriate tools at our disposal to do just about anything we need, far superior to that of our ancestors. It’s a problem of motivation and dependency. We’ve become cogs in the machine with golden handcuffs. We can no longer see the wood for the trees.
Our culture is led by myths and stories. We did not come into this world with governments, religions, ideologies, and personal beliefs. These are products of a culture that is a product of gossip — all created and fine-tuned to help Man cooperate flexibly in large groups. Myths are important to a functioning society, but we lest not get caught up in any empirical truths around them. Early humans did not squabble about belief systems, ideologies, and rights because they didn’t exist. So in our primal essence, what is freedom? What is a right? A right is also a myth because it is an inherent property concerning a pre-existing myth — The government. What the activists are really yelling about is a deeply intrinsic desire to break free from those myths. When the myth starts to interfere with the will of your core nature, your soul begins to subconsciously recognize the fallacies that you’ve been conditioned to believe is a reality. Your anger, fear, and confusion are symptoms that your soul has become a prisoner and is fighting to break free from the chains of that myth.
Is this just a bitter pill to swallow or is there any light at the end of the tunnel? If there is, it cannot be found outwardly. It starts with inner work because the story is coming to an end. We’re entering the climax in the third act of the great theatre of Man’s compelling narrative. The labyrinth of society is spiraling out of control, dividing itself into a million different pieces going in a million different directions, all connected and reproducing more and more myths upon myths at lightning speed. Your daily feed is a story merging with a story, rapidly changing your story — all while trying to fit this into the story you’ve created for yourself. The cup is overflowing and the glass is about to tip. Many are beginning to wake up to the matrix of society and the stories we tell to weave it together. The myths are getting so convoluted, seeming more and more unnatural, confusing, and hard to even make sense of. Our souls are desperate to break free and return to their core existence with all the knowledge and wisdom we’ve learned from the mistakes and triumphs of the past 5,000 years.
Socrates once described a society in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave:
In the allegory, “The Cave” a group of prisoners live chained to a wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected on the wall from objects and people passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to those shadows. The prisoners have been here for so long that the shadows have become the only reality they know.
Socrates explains how the philosopher is much like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not the direct source of the images seen. Further, when a prisoner escapes, only to find that the shadows on the wall are only fragments of reality, he returns to free the other prisoners and tells them that their reality is like an illusion of control. However, the prisoners do not desire to leave the prison because the shadows have become their reality and they know no better life.
So the question is, who are you? The prisoner who accepts the fragments of reality as absolute truth? Or the one who transcends the illusions of society to break free from the chains and live in power?
I spent years being the prisoner who saw the shadows as absolute truth. It took what I would call a spiritual transformation (via an undisclosed method) to shatter all that I believed in to show me I was wrong about everything. I had been spiraling into madness, trying to compartmentalize and understand all these nuances of society and where I stood, only to be brought back to the source and realize that’s actually much simpler than all that. All of the pain, sadness, suffering, anger, hate, and rage was my cup overflowing, as my soul needed to shatter the glass to break free. Though I had no idea at the time why everything seemed to be falling apart in my personal life, I’d come to find that it was my soul, desperate to re-emerge and break free of the chains of the myths I was living by. Now I choose to be the one that escaped the prison. Now I’m working toward something greater, and that starts with inner work.
In times like these, we quickly resort to outward expression to codify our beliefs and make our position seen and heard. This is often rooted in an effort to downplay each other’s beliefs. We’re so convinced of our beliefs, de facto, we fail to see that two can play that game. These are stories vs. stories, myths vs. myths — because we don’t know any better! But the truth is, there is more on the other side of the cave that we can’t see — Love. In its purest form, it’s something that few of us have come to ever truly understand. And once you discover Love for the first time, everything else becomes much clear as the ennui of society whittles away into a grand myth. This concept can be hard to wrap your head around or hazy to see as a viable solution, but it does have a far greater reach than you think. Somewhere in the annals of history, society was lost to power and greed. We’re getting ready to turn the last page of that book as the story comes to an end. Something great has the power to spawn from the ashes of it — for a society built on Love will be the greatest achievement of our species.
Hitherto, we haven’t seen an ounce of Love in a very long time as we trace back through the chapters of our history and come up with nothing but its absence. I postulate that things will get much worse before they get better, but that cannot be the cornerstone of the situation. It’s all in what we focus our attention and energy on, for we are all co-creating this story together and we all have the power to change its tone.
So what can we do while faced with the complex riddle of our failing social structure? Go inward, reconnect, and dislodge ourselves from our dependency on a system that’s not made to support us. This includes the rulers that we elect to solve our problems. Democracy has a way of handing over storytelling to a select group of people. But we can tell our own story and we can create our own reality. Turn over the leaf and become your own sovereign force because the answers you seek are out there. The liberty you want is out there. You don’t need “rights” granted to you by the overlords. Paddle your own canoe!
As I said above, we are entering a new era of higher consciousness. Together we can do that from page 1 and beyond. But it does not start with burning it all to the ground. It does not start with tearing each other apart. It does not start with overturning the system. It starts with separating yourself from the system. It starts with your own independence and power.
So on this holiday, I celebrate my own independence. You need not look further than the tools that already exist outside of the mechanical matrix we’ve come to accept as our only outlet. Ancestral wisdom of healing practices has been passed down for thousands of years before mass social structures were created. This planet is filled with all the tools we will ever need to heal or nourish our bodies. On that matter, there is a LOT we can do to distance ourselves from the powers that be, and there IS a way to become completely removed from their bag of tricks. This is a personal goal of mine and there’s plenty more I could write about independence from the system.
But my point right now is something else — There is no independence without interdependence, and there is no way to craft a new world without cooperative support from each other. The past 15 years, under the belt of the social media boom, have been an experiment that will either be our demise or rise. Going inward must not be confused with the selfish act of individualizing the human species. Thus far we’ve only seen an expansive effort to buttress the “Me” aspect of interconnectedness. “How does this affect me?” “How does this make me look?” “What do I stand for?” and of course “I want to be seen and heard” and “I want to be different”. This way of thinking has been the driving force of the predicament we’re in now. We often distort our own agenda to believe that we live in a world of acceptance, yet all evidence falls flat on our face as a world that promotes separation. So a new world, based on Love, must use these tools of interconnectedness to push the idea of community, rather than individual differences.
