Free Your Mind before you can Free Yourself, an Introduction to Voluntaryism

In 1989, on my 18th birthday, I signed up for 6 years of service in the United States Marine Corps. I did so with the idea in my head that I would be serving the citizens of the United States of America and protecting their rights, including my own. From day one my rights were stripped away from me. Freedom of speech? Gone. Right to bear arms? Only when allowed and ordered to. Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures? Ha! Right to a public trial? Gone, replaced by military courts. I retained the privilege of voting and some other privileges, but I had lost the right to disassociate myself when I wanted to.

I found it odd that I gave up my own rights for the purpose of defending others’ rights, I began to question it soon thereafter. I realized I had entered a Socialist military regime, where the government owned everything. They even owned ME. I could be punished for getting a sunburn for “destruction of government property” since I was their property. Another term for this is “slave”, where slave is defined as “a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another; a bond servant”. I resented the ownership of my being and, upon my discharge in 1996, I walked away as what I thought as a free man.

I then thrust myself into the corporate world as a wage-slave. I had to make money to survive and have the basics of life. I did not want to rely on welfare to support my basic functions. I eventually found myself without a job a year and a half later because I did not do what my corporate masters commanded of me. I later discovered that I could have retained my job and gotten help for my condition that led to my job loss but nobody at the corporation was forthright with this information. All corporate politics, I had stepped on some toes and they didn’t want me around.

So off to find yet another job to support myself and my habits, like eating and having a safe place to lay my head down to sleep peacefully. Over the course of the next few years I struggled to sort out in my head what had happened to me but I was emotionally and psychologically ill. Sometimes people don’t know how bad off they are until afterward, where hindsight gives you the full picture when you look at things objectively. Through various means I was educated into a way of thinking that few people get to experience, on the whole. I had studied under millionaires who told me the truth about some things but never really drove the point home. It was an advanced education but there was barely any introductory education that led up to the education I had received, so it took some time to sort it out in my head and I eventually got to a point where it all started to sink in, albeit slowly, and I am still having epiphanies about what these people had taught me.

Now years later I see society from a more objective viewpoint, by removing myself from the masses and looking at them as a whole. I do not read newspapers, listen to broadcast radio, or watch television that is broadcast or delivered by cable transmission. I educate myself through the internet and by talking to other people who are on the same “wavelength”. I admire those men and women who attempt to reach out to the masses to get them to see what kind of situation they’re in, regardless of geography or economics. I seek out open-minded people to associate with and I learn from everyone I speak with, even those who are so caught up in the system and living comfortably like slaves that get to live in the master’s house. I see their delicate comfort and see them strive to retain what little they have, even though it seems like they have a lot. I see an enslaved society that lives under the ruling thumb of authoritarians who have the power to yank you off the street and violate every right you think you have (which proves you don’t have the rights you think you have).

The only right we really have, that can still be taken away by the authorities, is the right to your private thoughts. How can they take that away, you may ask? They can subject you to torture and even physically injure your brain to where you cannot think straight. This is done by various means including poisoning your food (Monsanto), drugging you with or without your knowledge or consent (psychiatric drugs or chemicals in your water supply like fluoride, barium, strontium and chlorine, to name a few), even lobotomizing you legally (by forcing “crazy” people into mental institutions). We are still being indoctrinated by government education systems, even colleges and universities continue this indoctrination but it isn’t as bad as the public school systems. Public education does not teach you HOW to think although some teachers push you to try anyway, these educators that care have their hands tied and are themselves indoctrinated. It takes a concerted effort to break free from their own chains of slavery to the state and many do not realize that they are so enslaved.

The first step to freeing yourself is freeing your mind. Once you have opened your mind you have given yourself a precious gift, understanding and wisdom. The first thing you must understand is that things are not as they seem to be. Life in today’s world is an illusion of freedom, of individual power (like being able to vote, thinking you actually have a voice in how things should be), of having plenty or more than others. Mahatma Ghandi said, “You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”

• “Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you.” – Jack Kornfield

• Program verb: to cause to absorb or incorporate automatic responses, attitudes, or the like. – Dictionary.com

Our children, as we were at their age, are indoctrinated, programmed, to accept authority from day one in the public education system. They answer to and follow instructions from their teacher, who in turn answers to and follows instructions from the principal, who in turn answers to and follows instructions from the school board, and so forth. There is a heirarchical manner of authority that is trained into our children’s minds that becomes commonplace for them and they learn to accept it. If they do not accept it they will be punished and ridiculed by their peers, looked down upon, shunned and removed from the others in many cases by putting them in detention (school jail) or by removing them from the school system or placing them in the care of others for reprogramming in foster care or juvenile homes (another form of jail).

They are programmed to believe they have freedom in this country. But, as a cow is enslaved by the farmer, freedom isn’t necessarily a proper word for being allowed to walk to the other side of the field to eat the grass there. There is still a fence involved, a larger cage to contain them and keep them from roaming the earth as they wish. We have our own borders where we keep people in or out of the areas that aren’t owned by us, but by the government (if you believe you own your own property just try not paying your taxes and see how long you “own” it). We reward children for following the rules set forth for them. We do it as parents and we do not believe in democracy at home but pay homage to the idea of democracy in our society because we are programmed to believe we have it. The ideology behind our enslavement is set forth to put limits on what you may do, even if it does not harm others. They must arrive at school on time (just like you must do later on your job), sit down and be quiet while the authority is talking (just like you must do later on in church or on your job), complete your assignments on time and by the rules (just like later on in your job), and the cycle continues to indoctrinate them. Just because we have been programmed to believe ourselves that this is a good thing doesn’t make it a good thing, it just computes in our minds as being good, as we have been programmed.

The saying “pigs don’t know pigs stink” is appropriate to this train of thought. Although subjective to those of us who find the stench of pigs detestable, they subjectively do not know it for they believe their stench to be normal, for it is normal to them. The same goes for us. When we are indoctrinated into the mode of thinking that we are not enslaved by our system we do not understand or even realize that we are, in fact, enslaved to this system, we do not realize our system stinks. We are programmed to respond to certain input by media sources and certain situations that we are put into. A few examples of such are as follows; standing at attention and placing your hand over your heart for the National Anthem, responding to racial epithets with violent behavior, having an emotionally charged response of anger when you see someone burning your country’s flag, crying when the violin plays in an emotional movie or television program. These are all programmed responses to outside stimuli.

Our global society has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome which can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other. We as individuals are intermittently harassed, beaten, threatened, abused and intimidated by our governments (at local, state and federal levels) through such machinations as police, military and legislation and judiciary systems. To deny this is to deny your own situation and place in this world.

We must break free from this mode of thinking. One way I have done this myself is to come to understand what is called the “Non-Aggression Principle” which is defined as a moral stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate. This idea purports that in order to abide by the notion you must not assert aggression towards another without their [informed] consent. This applies in situations where you may feel “offended” by someone’s words and thereafter respond (as you may be programmed to) with physical aggression towards that person. Words are how manipulative people attempt to get a reaction from you that is not physical and, in the case of authority such as police assert over you, will then respond to your “physical” actions by caging you and/or degrading you publicly without aggression themselves. When you allow yourself to be so easily controlled you are playing into their hands and can land yourself in a cage for your programmed response.

Free your mind from such programming. Reprogram yourself as others have done in the past. Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.” You must let go of your fears and face them. Fear of reprisal for your actions that are not aggressive. When you fear something you insist that the opposite may be true because you are fearful. When you hear a truth that goes against your programming you immediately begin to fear. Free yourself from this fear, open your mind to the possibility that what you have heard may be grounded in truth. Question it and search your heart. It may not be easy to get to this understanding, depending on how entrenched your programming is, but you may find the truth is there. Find it by contemplating it. Search for other clues to either prove or disprove what you have heard. Question everything.

This piece is a repost of a blog I had written years ago. Since then I have discovered Voluntaryism and the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). I have since become an ordained minister (with no religious affiliations) as a Taoist Deist and run a group on Facebook called the Voluntaryist Ministry.