Slavery is freedom; Freedom is slavery?

http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35886/Wendy-McElroy-Can-I-Sell-Myself-into-Slavery/

One can be a slave to an idea of self that is not true, but maintained in preference to truth, and as a result defend its assertion against what IS true. This equates the self with a power to 'do' or act upon the Life that is defined outside or other. But first it is coercive unto its Self. That a self contradiction can give rise to an insanity of an attempt to resolve it externally is evident. But the self-image defends itself against exposure by every means available, and so the desire to observe the mind-in-act is usually only as a result of an attempt to gain insight in order to leverage more control, or the true insights arising from yielding the personal investment in coercive thinking.

Free will means freely willing, but a presumption of independent coercive power redefines free will as the capacity to DO what it chooses - being blind to the fact that all action is an automatic result of the mutually agreed definitions, beliefs, feelings, thoughts, perception, that generate the experience which is interpreted in terms of the past and the behaviour simply effects reaction - along with a script or narrative of self-justification.

That 'slave selves' should organize themselves as a result of attempts to dominate, own, coerce and manipulate others is inevitable. Unified or unifying power is meaningless or anathema to such structures of thought EXCEPTING to attempt to unify all powers under one global power.

True relationship is not a contractual attempt to use the relationship only as a means to GET from, but an extension of a connected wholeness brought TO the relationship. The substitution of true presence with artifice is choosing to identify in mask rather than actually meet the other - or one's self. When all agree to turn away, the presence of Life has been disregarded in order to seek and find one 'own' life on one's 'own' terms' - and this seems a freedom while the 'Prodigal's' pockets are full of friends - but the journey is one of depletion and disillusionment into darkness and isolation - and all of it operates a mechanism of diminishing returns that finally require 'selling' or abusing every vestige of inherited integrity to get cash for the next 'fix'.

ONCE one is exclusively identified with the body and its corresponding personality structure (in the realm of blind powers acting upon each other), Coercion can be brought to bear by direct violence through to subtle inferences that are backed by the capacity or belief in the capacity to effect such violence on one's body, one's mind, one's loved ones, one's assets. The 'balance of powers' includes a willingness to limit such power through rules, laws and collective enforcement. But the nature of guile is to operate in the shadows towards undermining such limitations in one's own personal agenda and its own self-justifying exceptionalism.

So within the experience of our waking conscious sense of the world, we experience a conflict between an inherited or innate integrity that may be heavily denied by fearful and guilt or shame-framed self-definition, and the dictate of fear which operates as a driven or threatened sense of personal survival. Awakening to integrity and choosing to stand in it and live from it, may well meet the confusions of a split sense of self, but is awake beneath it and within it. Freedom to be who you are is the freedom to withdraw allegiance from what you are not. It is also the freedom to be truly guided as to how to relate in any given situation so as to release the hooks and triggers whereby guilt and fear would manipulate or 'bait' reaction. Freedom is of the Spirit - that is the freedom of Purpose. When all that arises is used to serve a willingness to uncover truth - then that is the purpose it shall have for you. When that is the ONLY purpose, then you have released all that WANTED untruth in yourself.

It is easy to invent scenarios to demolish love's reality for that has been the job description of the mind for millennia. But life is not rehearsal in mental dissociation so much as an ongoing unfolding living relationship in which one swims with the current or apparently against it - yet it flows as one whatever the little eddies and undercurrents may suggest.

What one attunes to becomes the focusing of their choosing and their experience - which then conditions the mind as reinforcement. Un-owned and un-transmuted fear is slavery. Identified and accepted guilt is powerlessness. Both can take many forms so as to operate a protection racket.

Following the dictate of fear  - albeit dresses as the temptation to 'power' or self-specialness - 'sells one's Soul' - which is to say trades an innate and integral capacity for joy and creative relationship for a 'lead role in a cage'.

The way out of an impossible situation... is to recognize you are not in it. Yet experience is equated with 'reality' and seeing is equated with 'believing'. Such is the slavery of a conditioned mind.

"Can I choose to deny true freedom in ever deeper and more complex and conflicting patterns of denial"? The answer is not to ask the question as a means to find out! Knowing that this is a painful and self-defeating futility, can you or anyone want this?

The capacity to maintain the focus in the physical experience is temporary. Not only requiring daily sleep, but innumerable correspondences behind the scenes to effect the experience - for even the material aspect of existence is not as solid and continuous as it seems. It also tends to operate as a discrete 'life-time' whether long or short.

While we cling to life in the terms we set, we fear not only death, but Life Itself. When Plato's freed man tries to speak to those in the cave, they will not hear, or will redefine what they hear in terms of chains. For they yet seek to be free from light, so as to dream alone in darkness. Dreams of freedom YES! Good News! Now they can understand. Feed them dreams of freedom so that they can cover and salve the pain and shame of a broken will, a lost love, a shadow of a life.

"Can I let myself into freedom"?

By siding with it instead of fighting for it. There is no freedom in hate. Don't take the bait!

What's Wrong?

David Mitchell: There's a lot wrong with the world. Isn't there?


Human beings have trained themselves to see what's wrong with anyone, everyone - and Everything! Not least because they believe they know what is wrong with themselves and insist it must be TRUE! When we look through a glass darkly, we justify a lack of presence. The lovelessness we 'see' is what the world looks like when your love is withheld. This must seem IMPOSSIBLY trite! But what is wrong with the world is now becoming all-powerful but for a few scavenged crumbs, and what is Right with your Existence, your being that is love - is discarded, denied, invalidated, weak and wishful.... by thinking.

What thinking does is to embody the intensity of the feelings arising from the beliefs of self-definition that are accepted true. It all makes your experience of the Only Thing Going On - which is Is - Existence. It's a Gift. We are free to choose but if we choose to forget we are free to choose we experience being victim to everything that is wrong with the world.

If you WANT to argue to KEEP grievance, you can, but do you Really Want It? Or is it something that grievance seems to give your self-belief that you truly desire? Looking to See is not thinking about. Look and see what is running our minds as 'thinking' and ask yourself if it is true of You? If you are willing to know, it is simply given you. If you a fearful of knowing, you make complexities to defer and delay and obfuscate. That's ok too - why not look and see and know whey you are afraid to know? I don't mean pontificating weaponizing disguising 'knowing' - but just the peace of knowing.

Everyone is making choices - whatever one does or says we have chosen to share in a realm of choice and choose we will. To know the choice you are making is being clear about who You are in Your relationships. This is the ONLY part you CAN play in the healing or awakening or re-aligning of health and happiness in the world - and the state of the world SEEMS to be the overriding reason WHY you cannot be you.

Perhaps one has the map upside down - for all one's diligence thereafter. Perhaps the noticing of what's wrong with the world is the only way to wake up to the call to decide to Be You anyway. Any way that is You. Powerlessness is a choice, a set up, a frame up. As soon as we take the bait of such thinking we believe, feel and experience accordingly. Life is Bigger. Infinitely Bigger. Perspective changes everything. Compulsion and reaction and conditioning are all locked in perspectives. Don't just think and do something, Look and See!

Bill commented (to the main article):

"There is nothing wrong with the world; it is only the people on it".

Or more accurately, only the mutually reinforced thoughts in the mind that reflect the experience of thoughts of wrongness as operating in a world of other people.

And they are not really wrong so much as thoughts that feel dissonant when chosen and so give rise to a sense of sin or wrongness that then projects out and away from itself to try to escape its own judgement.

What is the world when we PAUSE from using it to dump or scapegoat or appropriate blame? I don't ask that to be thought about - but invite the practice.

Paradigm Shift

Rand Paul Expands the Political Dialectic – And That's a Good Thing

Accepting responsibility for what cannot be escaped because it is ours, and releasing the usurping or taking on of that which is not our responsibility or even capacity, is recognizing freedom to be what we are and releasing the negatively reinforcing trap of trying to become free in terms of who we are not.

As far as I am concerned - everything pivots upon our self definition. Proceeding on the basis of a false and limiting self-definition sets up all the conflicted identity down the line.
Painful and insoluble problems must ultimately invite a yielding of self-certainties in willingness for fresh perspective. But they will in the meantime ratchet ever more pain, struggle and insanity of the attempt to force the old paradigm of coercion and control upon living relationships (aka 'Life').

The old paradigm abuses the channels or mediums of communication, where the new paradigm re-opens them at a deeper level than the old can imagine or recognize AS communication. It will not see it at all, or it sees meaninglessness or threat. Because it fundamentally 'sees' in terms of threat.

Embracing the new paradigm grows increasingly unwilling and unable to tolerate the old way - which is seen as a way of dis-integrity of self. 'Divide and rule' is not merely the pattern of  an elitist or powerful few upon the many - but a patterning within consciousness itself that operates a fear driven identity. A lack driven identity. A scarcity or poverty defined identity. Externals alone will not 'heal' such a compulsive disorder. But the extending of a true sense of worth does serve to undermine the basis of a sense of fear in unworthiness or inadequacy.

When the systems meant to serve become corrupted as a method of ensuring scarcity, lack and fearful dependence, they teach that coercion is power and that getting for oneself alone - or only one's own - is meaningful. The world that reflects such self-definition or core belief is merely a logical or lawful outcome of its predicates.

Anything that opens communication allows the possibility of a shift in consciousness. Masking communication with complex presentations of no substance consolidates the same failure to relate in new sets of make-believe clothes. Underneath it all is a communication breakdown, a failure to relate that became a fearful defence against communication and the avoidance OF relationship.

Compulsive thinking makes a sort of virtual screen upon which lies can seem true and truth can be feared as deception. It isn't that we only use 10% of our capacities (or perhaps much less than that!) but that we use 100% of our capacity to emulate running as someone with only 10%. Self depreciation and impoverishment call forth the conditions that reinforce the beliefs one accepts by acting from them. As does a self divided unto itself. Whatever we may think or say we are teaching, we always actually communicate on a deeper level what we are actually believing ourselves to be.

Acting out from a congruency of being is not an attempt to change others or change the world, it is an extension of an appreciation of existence that blesses the world. The withholding of one's blessing is an obeisance to a god of judgement, that uses the energy given it to insinuate itself in deceits that corrupt and subvert true governance to then serve as ITS defence against exposure and subsequent rejection for its lack of foundation - and its appalling cost.

While the mind of blame is valued as currency, the political discussion will be about shifting blame around rather than shifting from the mindset of blame to a true responsibility as consciousness.

Something fishy in media promotion of sexual politics

The media is used to promote 'gender and sexual politics' in ways that are often divisive and manipulative. This article is an example.

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People with vaginas?
Baby cannons?
"Make" them smell?
You do have fun with words!

Women's genitals have an odour. Everyone is unique and yet a vagina is recognizably vagina. All kinds of conditions affect the smell.
A disposition to embrace and appreciate and honour will align an integrated joyful health. Imposing a disconnected personal set of fearful self definitions, demands, struggles and stresses does not help the body in its function of serving you.
So much of what anyone tries to sell you is fear-based. That doesn't mean it cannot serve your loving - but make it your positive act and don't be tricked into trying to be someone you are not - or fearing that who you are is not worthy of love - right here right now - just because!
'Men' -  Idon't know about 'men' - such a sweeping generalisation! Being true to yourself is the gift from which everything else can line up truly. What does that mean but a deep self acceptance of that you are - and that how you are thinking and feeling about yourself is very likely to contain a lot of baggage that you are better off without. But one cannot let go of what is not first owned.
Love is sometimes already like peaches. No need to paint the roses red - but you can; if you want to.
Love has no needs but to share itself. Fear operates a need to withhold and hide itself. Love communicates through the body and the mind and beyond. Fear uses the body to break communication and separate in a masked presentation that then seeks to get from rather than be be with.
Because 'men' can withhold their presence, women can wonder if it is something they 'did wrong'. No. But we can only relate from an honesty and feel good about ourselves. Which simply means not trying to be what you are not. When its ok to say one feels awkward it often suddenly frees up the whole situation. Love is so much more than vaginas - But they are also embraced and embracing as an integral aspect of your being. Even if you are one of the people without one of their own.
What is the purpose behind such 'articles' - what do you think the powers that lobby and guide and decide Guardian policy intend it to serve?
Perhaps a 'media cannon' to insinuate its ideas into your mind? Or promoting sexual identity politics as a divisive agenda whilst pretending to smell of peaches? Or feeding ideas of feminine identity that do not actually embrace, honour and appreciate what it is to be a whole Souled woman, regardless the particular challenges that may not affirm or extend that recognition to you.
Needs are both simple and complex in that the discernment of what exactly is called for or not called for in a given relationship or situation is not rocket science, but that once the mind gets involved along with emotional triggers and confusions the complexity can be like an impenetrable thicket.
If people beat about the bush and wont come through, they simply are not coming to share the love of life with You. Often we discover who we truly are only after trying out who we are not. It's good to fail at being who you are not! Now you can live more consciously on purpose - just being you. Joy to the world!