Freedom and the State; Caesar and God: ends and means

This article on freedom and the state and strategies of libertarianism prompted various responses. Mine is below.
Rothbardian Thoughts on Strategy
By Sheldon Richman

It is easy to react to what one has judged unawares - as if one is relating directly with an external or oppositional reality, when whatever is occurring is one's own definition overlaid upon the arising relational situation. Hence the adjunct to be vigilant against deception.

Mutually agreed definitions and judgements become competing 'realities' or 'truths' or ideologies, within which apparent unities of purpose or endeavour faction and fragment like the tower of Babel, when the context against which seemed a unity, shifts... as it will.

I do not regard myself as Christian - in the traditional sense -  in fact I do not regard myself as anything in terms of a locked in identity - because I find my true identity in the expression of the freedom to relate, to receive and to give and to know that freedom in act as well as recognize the same quality in others - regardless their current choices. But Jesus also addressed the issue of worldy power and obligation - vs inner allegiance and congruity of value in thought, act and deed. And yet an exclusive or militant materialism cannot engage with the Meaning beyond the form - for all forms have locked in meanings and the mind of such assertion is locked in its own thinking by its own choice.

The Meaning beyond the form is that from which all forms derive their meaning. Perhaps I might arrive at a useful exposition of this here.

Any sense of exclusively personal power immediately and inherently opens the possibility of personal powerlessness and inadequacy to meet the situation at hand. This feels dissonant as conflicted feelings and purposes - ie: a chaotic psycho-emotional state that is intolerable.

The desire to persist in the personal sense of power is not associated with the powerlessness which seems to be a result of oppositional wills or forces.

Identity in powerlessness (victimhood) appeals to the personal sense of power to protect and unify it against intolerable chaos. That is , it gives its power away to the idea of coercive control as 'protector'.

The resultant coercion suppresses and limits the range of the expression to a will and projects the conflict outside and way from what the realm of personal control it now identifies as itself.

The denied will is thus rendered 'unconscious' and the projected conflict perceived externally and reacted to as such 'protects' it from its core fears whilst embodying them as unrecognised external relations of separate and disconnected reality.

Perpetual war is the condition of living within such an identity - but it can be expressed and distributed in such a way as to seem to contain arenas of victory or truce, alliances and paths of discovery of freedom and enlightenment. But always the core conflict is propagated through all of its expressions because it is inherent to its predicate and is this its predicament.

There is no freedom within a compulsive identity of reaction but there is always the freedom to choose not to use it and thus release the identification in coercion.

In the fragmenting of the mind was Meaning lost to conflicted meanings that are by definition meaningless, but the desire to protect the meaning of personal power becomes a central focus through which attempt to unify the self operates and ascribes its own meanings to everything that it incorporates into its world. For everything is judged according to its perceived use or threat to the survival or persistence of the personal sense of control.

However meanings are not fixed and investments are released and some of this occurs as part of the normal process of development or adaptation to the 'world'. Some as a result of crisis that forces a transformation of thought and identity or trauma that reopens the core separation experience.

The recognition of the coercive will as unwanted may arise from realising one's self destructive scripts, or the meaninglessness of hollow victory, the pain of a sham , or any number of avenues of arising honesty.

The recognition and release of what does not in fact protect or belong is freewillingly embraced as an acceptance of reintegration through the separation experience to the free flowing restoration of unified purpose - which then expresses itself through the personality construct one had in a sense grown as a segregative attempt to unify or make a self of that which is not true of what in clarity of discernment is now seen to not be who you are.

Purpose is the underlying orientation of desire that focuses and aligns the mind. There is already Purpose inherent in Life but it is not coercive upon its expressions as to how that purpose is expressed or reflected.

The freedom to believe one can abort, defile, destroy, poison or oppose such purpose is inherent in a truly un-coerced and free imagination and the Human exploration of such ideas of limitation, separation, opposition, conflict, war and vengeance are experienced real because we act from the desire and belief that the power to do so is our reality. Freedom is expressed even here - but in ways that do not know themselves free - that do not know who they are because they choose to believe what they are not and blame it on their world and hate it for failing them and meet the hateful and are worn down and entangled in the taxes of their own defences. And so crisis necessitates transformation.

When everything shifts it isn't just that what doesn't work any more doesn't work - it is seen that it never was true but seemed so.

The old currencies of thought are not only unworkable, they cost - or work against the arising of the new. Until the mind of such thinking can be noticed rather than enacted. Then the devices of persecution or suppression work to more clearly illuminate the self-definitions we otherwise unknowingly carry that are the obstruction to our own appreciation of a truly lived existence Now.

Living from the already free is not a matter of effort, but of consistent and persistent willingness as awareness - not thought. One does not become free. One becomes more aware of the freedom one is. False notions of freedom enslave. Discernment is inherent to a true self worth. The wish for magical solutions invites a manipulative magician to synchronize with your current reality - but conflict is not solved by wishing - but resolved in wholly willing. There is no unity in a fearful agenda. But fears that are owned and embraced and lived through become the very means of releasing what does not belong.

What you give out is what you get back. Forgive and be (know yourself) forgiven. The attempt to get rid of hate and fear by projecting is the way to KEEP it fixed in your mind. One does not get rid of anything - one releases what is not belonging and focusses entirely on what does - what one truly resonates with in the knowing of that unique quality of being you know is you. Your world will in its own timing reflect an entirely different perspective as a result of you having changed. You cannot access such perspective from changing the world. That is the persistence of the attempt to solve ones inner conflict in external scenarios.

Anything I write is simply information or idea that can be freely considered or ignored. Authority dwells in the discernment of the receiver, for no matter what the apparent form of the source, it is the quality of recognition of true resonance and relevance that opens the insight or inner knowing that is beyond words - and yet can communicate through them in the qualities of life.