Tag Archives: personal freedom

Time to Move to Texas

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While California Aims to Reestablish COVID Policies, Texas Outlaws Masks, Lockdowns and Vaccine Mandates

September 1, 2023 NewsWars, Jimmy Dore and KENS TV San Antonio 0

California’s government has updated its Covid safety website with protocols that set the stage for pandemic-era restrictions on daily life. The website advised that “California’s COVID-19 State of Emergency is over, but COVID-19 has not gone away,” and admonished that we need to keep taking steps to prevent the spread. The document promotes self-isolation, mask-wearing, digital vaccine records, and more. The federal government took steps to enact Covid lockdowns that were to begin with incremental restrictions next month, but it has retreated due to push back.Texas: On September 1, local governments will be prohibited from requiring COVID-related masks, vaccines, or business shutdowns. However, Senate Bill 29 does not restrict private entities from enforcing their own rules.

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.California’s government has updated its Covid safety website with protocols that set the stage for pandemic-era restrictions on daily life.

“California’s COVID-19 State of Emergency is over, but COVID-19 has not gone away,” reads the opening statement on the safety measures page. “To safely go about our daily lives, we need to keep taking steps to prevent the spread.”

The page goes on to promote self-isolation, mask-wearing & digital vaccine records, and more.

There’s even a “Do’s and don’ts for daily life.”

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This rush to normalize biometric tyranny comes alongside Alex Jones’ scoop that the feds are setting the stage for full Covid lockdowns that will begin with incremental restrictions next month.

 

Read full article here…

California Covid Safety document:       https://covid19.ca.gov/safely-reopening/

KENS TV San Antonio:       https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-law-banning-covid-related-mandates-by-local-governments-takes-effect-this-week/ar-AA1fRDjF

from:    https://needtoknow.news/2023/09/while-california-aims-to-reestablish-covid-policies-texas-outlaws-masks-lockdowns-and-vaccine-mandates/

Americans, AWAKE!!!!!

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by Jon Rappoport

COVID: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

In my last article, I explained why the only thing worse than Trump is Biden, and therefore Trump needs to win the election.

Face it. Both men, in their own ways, are fronting for massive COVID crimes. Biden hopes to front for even greater tyranny if he can gain the presidency.

To excuse the two of them, on the basis that they’re blind to the fake science, doesn’t cut it. They’re willing to assault the Constitutional and natural freedoms of every American.

They’re willing to go where NO emergency is permitted to go.

Natural disaster, health disaster, political violence, war—there is NO situation that excuses past, present, or future lockdowns.

The miles of fake science that have been launched to explain, justify, and make sense of the “COVID containment measures” are a farce; but beyond that, they’re irrelevant—because freedom and liberty are the enduring foundations of life. No matter what. They are not subject to “adjustment.” They’re not “relative” qualities, subject to “circumstances.”

Once, this would have been obvious to the majority of Americans. Now, further pacified, further weakened, the majority are deep in hypnotic trance.

Exchanging freedom for chains is a titanic proposition. Trump presided over it and did nothing. Since then, he’s refused to confess to the amount of economic devastation that has occurred. Biden wants to double down and make the slavery more complete.

No American political leader with high visibility has the balls to call what has happened a COUP—call it a coup not once, but over and over, until more people wake up.

In the several versions of the film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the characters continue to look the same, but they’ve been taken over by an evil force. They’re now robotic. An updated incarnation of the film could be shot at a large Whole Foods, showing shoppers trudging along aisles pushing their carts, wearing their masks, avoiding eye contact. Liberty and freedom have been washed from their minds.

They are now “products of circumstances.”

They can no longer think for themselves.

I would have a character dressed as Thomas Paine enter the store, unmasked. He would walk among the shoppers, reciting his immortal words from The Crisis, Number 1:

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated…”

He would brush away the store clerks who approach him and tell him he must put on a mask. He would ignore the masked shoppers who give him hostile looks. He would keep reciting his long-forgotten words, until…gradually the shoppers begin to awake from their induced trance.

One, two, three of them take off their masks. They BREATHE…

And why not have Trump enter the scene? He talks out of both sides of his mouth. He attacks Fauci. He praises the vaccine. He hails the rebirth of the economy. He says the virus is dangerous. He puts on a mask. He takes it off. He puts it back on again…

Tom Paine approaches him and says, “When are you going to admit you were the central character in shutting down the American economy? When are you going to tell the people how great the economic and human wreckage is?”

Trump spouts out blame against various persons and governments, but will not take responsibility…

He says to Paine, “Watch out for Biden. If he comes in here with his troops, they’ll shoot you.”

Paine laughs. “Dummy, I’m a SPIRIT. Bullets can’t affect me. I patrol the border between your side and mine. What I say is buried in the hearts of many people on your side. They turned into robots, but they never agreed completely with the change. They still yearn for the freedom we won a long time ago. They still know what it means. FREEDOM is what rips this whole insanity apart. Stop bullshitting like a real estate operator. Talk FREEDOM. Go to the core. You’re the PRESIDENT…”

Trump looks baffled. “You mean the freedom to prosper, economically?”

“NO, YOU IDIOT. THE FREEDOM TO BE FREE. FREE FROM CRIMINAL RESTRAINTS. DON’T YOU KNOW WHY WE FOUNDED THIS NATION?”

Well, does he? Does Trump know? If he loses this election, it will be on him. He doesn’t know. He can’t go to the core. His mind and soul stop at building golf courses and re-energizing Kodak so it can manufacture pharmaceuticals.

From:    https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/10/21/covid-is-a-fraud-so-is-trump-so-is-biden/

Are We Losing the Battle?

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The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction

The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction

John W. Whitehead, Rutherford
Waking Times

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future.

The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or not it has always had the authorization to do so.

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.

Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

All three—Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell—had an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984:

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free,” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts….

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell

Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government. In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial “needle in a haystack,” as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through fusion centers across the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children. These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any “threatening” words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, “citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.”

Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”—Orwell

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

About the Author

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute, where this article (The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction) was originally published. He is the author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State and The Change Manifesto.

from:    https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/06/10/the-omnipresent-surveillance-state-orwells-1984-is-no-longer-fiction/

DisQUIETing Skies

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Image: Passengers stand in line outside a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint

A surveillance program that monitors Americans on domestic flights, even if they are not suspected of a crime or having ties to terrorism, is being questioned by civil liberties advocates.

“The whole thing is just absurd on so many levels,” said Hugh Handeyside, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.

The program — dubbed “Quiet Skies” by the Transportation Security Administration — has been in existence since 2010 but was disclosed for the first time this past weekend by The Boston Globe.

TSA’s ‘Quiet Skies’ program raises privacy concerns

JUL.30.2018 01:35

The Globe said “Quiet Skies” tracks U.S. citizens who have been flagged to the TSA based on their affiliations or travel histories. One businesswoman who had recently traveled to Turkey, for example, was tracked.

If a passenger is selected for such secret tracking, a federal air marshal monitors him or her during the flight. The air marshal notes in a “behavior checklist” whether the individual slept, shaved or changed clothes mid-flight, or boarded last, among other criteria. The air marshal also takes note of whether the passenger has a “cold penetrating stare” or is fidgeting, the Globe reported.

The data is then sent to the TSA, although it’s not clear what happens to the information afterwards.

In a statement to NBC News, the TSA described “Quiet Skies” as a “practical method of keeping another act of terrorism from occurring at 30,000 feet.” It compared it to other common practices in law enforcement, like stationing a police officer in an area vulnerable to crime.

“They haven’t demonstrated any need for it or whether it’s effective.”

But legal experts slammed the program.

“They haven’t demonstrated any need for it or whether it’s effective,” said Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, noting that the TSA has yet to reveal whether “Quiet Skies” has stopped any security threats. “We certainly need to have more information, but I think the concerns that they are profiling are pretty high.”

Patel said every aspect of the program poses concerns: how the TSA chooses which passengers to track; what data the TSA is collecting; and then what becomes of the data. Keeping such information may be a violation of the Privacy Act, a federal law that governs how personal identifiers are collected and used.

“As far as I know, this data collection hasn’t been specifically authorized by Congress, and even if it was, they would have to publish a notice that they’re collecting this information and keeping it in a database — which we haven’t seen at all,” she said.

“Quiet Skies” also raises questions of whether the TSA has continued to use passenger-screening methods that were discredited more than a year ago.

Last February, the American Civil Liberties Union criticized another behavior detection program that the TSA had been using to flag certain travelers for additional inspection, finding it to be unscientific and rife with racial and religious profiling.

Some American travelers tracked in ‘Quiet Skies’ government surveillance program

JUL.29.201801:46

“A lot of those behaviors reflect what may be consistent with stress or anxiety, and if they’re looking for stress or anxiety in an airport, they’ll find it,” he said.

The surveillance has also received criticism from within the TSA, according to the Globe, which reported that multiple unnamed air marshals felt the work was time-consuming, costly and a distraction from more important law enforcement work.

John Casaretti, president of the Air Marshal Association, the federal air marshals’ union, echoed that.

“The American public would be better served if these [marshals] were instead assigned to airport screening and check-in areas so that active shooter events can be swiftly ended,” he said in a statement.

from:    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tsa-s-quiet-skies-program-raises-legal-civil-liberty-questions-n895806

Finding Your Voice

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4 Ways to Keep From Being Overwhelmed by the Tribe

by Zen Gardner –

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff Writer
Waking Times

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes the tribe can be a bit suffocating. Whether “the tribe” is familial, societal, or cultural, it can make even the most extraverted of us claustrophobic. Sometimes in order to keep from being subjugated and engulfed by the status quo, we need to break away. We need to discover a secret place, a sacred space, where we are free to howl at the moon and bow to the sun without a judgmental eye over our shoulder. Where North is a drumroll, and South is a compass. Where we can count to infinity and surf the cosmic wave without the clanking of steel or the honking of horns in our ear. Where East is a crossroads, and West is a threshold. Where we are free to slap the face of God and dance with our demons, and vice versa, without a disapproving finger-wag or a whiny “blasphemy!” from the outdated crowd. Sometimes in order to discover our true place in this life we must disrupt our lives. Like Charles Simic poetically stated, “He who cannot howl, will not find his pack.” In the spirit of finding our place in the world, our sacred pack, here are four ways to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

1.) Meditation and Solitude

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity” –John Muir

Mankind is fundamentally connected with the Earth and with the cosmos. Neither the Earth’s problems nor humanity’s problems can be resolved without taking full account of this interdependence. And so it goes with the alienation between cosmos and psyche within the individual.

A powerful way to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe is meditation and solitude. Doing so tears through the veil of ignominy and launches us past the smoke and mirrors of the cultural paradigm. The struggle of independence and codependence between the individual and the tribe melts away into the peace of interdependence, which is why it is usually while we’re immersed in nature that we feel the most alive. As Henry David Thoreau said, “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him… Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

It is out in the wild places, away from the commotion of the tribe which is incessantly “distracted from distraction by distraction,” where we discover for ourselves what is medicine and what is poison. Solitude and meditation helps us figure out this most basic energy: how to discern between healthy and unhealthy, right and wrong, good and bad, and what to do about it in regards to the self, the tribe, and the world. As Sogyal Rinpoche said, “What we have to learn in both meditation and in life is to be free of attachment to the good experiences and free of aversion to the negative ones.”

2.) Throw Yourself Into Adventure

“If you end up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.” –Frank Zappa

Tired of living a boring life? Sick of walking around in circles within a tiny comfort zone that constricts your way of being in the world? Weary of the yoke of civilization herding you into a life of nine-to-five slavery and daily grinds? There are ways out of boredom: stop being boring. There are strategies for stretching comfort zones: do constructive things that make you uncomfortable. Comfort is as much of an obstacle as the obstacle itself, whatever the obstacle may be. Quit your job and seek out real, sacred, authentic work that makes your soul sing, no matter how scary it might be getting started. Go where the fear is. Test your boundaries. Courage is to fear as diamond is to “in the rough.”

So throw yourself into adventure. Toss yourself into a sacred journey. Chuck your too-conditioned heart into the unconditional abyss. Lob your overly-brainwashed brain into the crushing waves of the cosmic ocean. Hurl your cowardice into the fire of your fear and bear witness as the unstoppable Phoenix of your courage rises out of the ashes. Slip your cover. Discard all masks. Discover the naked vulnerability of your heart-soul pulsing against the hard gravity of an unforgiving universe. Lose your footing. Lose your balance. Fall flat on your face if you have to. Then rise up from the dust with a full heart; with the blood, sweat and tears of your daring marring your overrated reputation. In short, die a small death. Only the death of your ego can give birth to your soul. Like Mark Twain said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

3.) Overcome Yourself

“The real struggle of the heroic individual is not solely to liberate himself from conflict with society, but rather to use the conflict within himself as a source for self-regeneration.” –Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Could there be anything more powerful, more self-evolving, more vitally important to our own time, than the ability to self-overcome? To take in hand the tangled knot of the ego and dare to unravel it? To gaze into a mirror and brave the shattered depths? To peel back layer after layer, security blanket after security blanket, until the soft, vulnerable, baby-Hydra-self is revealed? To gamble with our sense of self and, having won or lost, emerge with the hard-fought-for scars that prove the course of our wisdom. Perhaps Joss Whedon said it best, “Don’t just be yourself. Be all of your selves.”

The best way to maintain vigilance over our inconsistent personality is to simply roll with the inconsistencies by assuming a multitude of personas. One could argue that the more personas we adopt the more likely we are to be individuated. The more masks we don and discard, the more likely we are to achieve a humor of the most high. This is precisely because of cognitive dissonance. Since our personalities are inconsistent and change is inevitable anyway, it behooves us to adapt and overcome to such change rather than deny that the change is occurring. We do this through adopting multiple personas that may or may not be consistent with a dominant persona. This has the potential to increase empathy, humor, and love; in the sense that the more personas we can identify with –like latent shadow personas and darker personalities– the more likely we are to subsume the human condition itself, or at least be able to compassionately relate to other people’s difference as we have already learned how to relate to the plentitude of differences within ourselves.

4.) Amorally Rebel 

“All is well with the world, when all is not well with the world.” –Alan Gillis

Look inward and ask yourself: am I caught inside a grand cognitive illusion? Play with the answers until questions emerge. Toy with the ideas that arise until they become ideals, and then crush them like you would a mental paradigm. We are caught between moral and immoral, between left and right, between good and evil, between healthy and unhealthy; between so many illusory dualities that we mistakenly begin to see the world dualistically. But it’s not. Nothing is fixed. Everything is in flux. There is no black and white. There is no permanence. There is only a smeared out Middle Gray blank-slate that we vainly attempt to pigeonhole colors onto. Like Robert Anton Wilson said, “The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.”

But there’s no reason whatsoever that you yourself cannot rise up as one of these shamans and fight “whatever” to a standstill, keeping in mind that the “standstill” is the illusion. It’s the “fight” that’s real. It’s the struggle with a universe in constant flux that’s real. It’s between the extremism at either end of the spectrum of power where the real sacred dance is occurring. It’s in the throes of amoral rebellion where we shine brightest. The moralist is blinded by too much light. The immoralist chokes on too much darkness. The amoralist pierces the dark with their light and diffracts the light with their darkness.

Amoral rebellion puts the powers that be on high notice. We will not be pigeonholed into their outdated constructs of power. We will not be placated by bipartisan claptrap. We will not be bamboozled by plutocratic smoke and mirrors. We will not be consumed by the tribe. We will rise above it and self-evolve, dragging it, kicking and screaming through the brambles of our own fruition if need be. We will become a power unto ourselves, a freedom unto ourselves. We will become a force to be reckoned with. Like Bill Plotkin said, “The world was made to be free in: this we know in our bones, and this definitive and fearful knowledge is what both supports us and requires us to turn away from our secure but less-than-joyful lives.”

from:     http://www.zengardner.com/4-ways-keep-overwhelmed-tribe/