I think this is the key to my thinking...what is the best way to respond? But not only that, what is the most feasible way for one person, to respond? Is educating ourselves a response? or is it actually inaction?
Imagine that from birth you are put into a maze.
Now because you have been in that maze from birth you don't know that it is a maze and you don't know that there is a world outside that maze.
So you turn this way and that and you keep hitting dead ends. The maze is constructed in such ways as to control and direct your behaviour, thought and energies in certain directions. Everyone around you is conforming to those programmed behaviours and thoughts.
But something inside you is nagging you. You feel that the direction you are constantly directed in are not in alignment with how you feel. You feel there is something more to the whole story.
One day you do not follow the signs in the maze and you walk in the opposite direction to everyone else. After a while you find a passage that you never knew was there and you go through it into the outside world
This is pretty much how the perception prison works. It is ingenious because people are imprisoned by their own thoughts which have been implanted into their head through conditioning.
However the day that you fully realise the extent to which you have been lied to is the day that the walls of the prison come tumbling down. Its like a switch going in the head. The world becomes a totally new place as you are faced with a whole new set of perceptions which are radically different to your previously held perceptions.
When you speak to people you are able to quickly tell if they are operating under the old operating system of perceptions or if they have upgraded to the new one.
But the 'educating yourself' part of the process is essential to first escape the maze.
Imagine a perception to be a slide held up in front of your eyes. That image is all you know. But if you get some information that contradicts that reality then it puts a crack in the perception. One piece of information is easy to dismiss though becase as human beings we are able to warp our perceptions of reality. If however we continue to receive contradictory information then more and more cracks appear in our perception until eventually it breaks revealing a new perception behind it.
However....we have to allow the perception to break; others can offer us lots of information that contradicts our old perception but only we can then assimilate it....because as i said we are able to warp our perceptions of reality to fit the ideas that we want to believe.
What i've realised from discussing and debating with thousands of people in a number of places online and offline over a number of years is that for a person to see a new perception of reality they have to WANT TO DO IT. I'll come back to that in a moment...
But to go back to the educating ourselves aspect of this.....we have to get that information that will contradict our perceptions in order to break down our current perception. An example of this process happening early in a persons life is the lie of santa claus where children are told that if they behave a magic, jolly man will come down their chimney at christmas time and leave them presents. However over time the children get information to contradict that perception. They begin to hear whisperings in the playground that santa isn't real and they stay up late, pretending to be asleep on christmas to try and catch a glimpse of santa but instead they see their parents dropping off the presents. Enough cracks exist in the perception now that they have enough suspicion to confront their parents who finally admit that santa does not exist. The childs perceptions of reality then undergo a radical change.
The santa myth is really just the beginning for that child though. As they grow older they encounter many people weaving myths and various perceptions of reality. They get it from the church, the government, the education system and the media all of which tell them a variety of perceptions.
If you think about the mainstream news....what they are doing is weaving narratives with good guys and bad buys just like the old hollywood westerns with their white hat (goodguy) v's black hat (bad guy) stories. But who decides who is a good guy and who is a bad guy when each side in each conflict calls the other the 'terrorists?' hence the saying: 'one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter'.
So the educating yourself part of the process is about YOUR liberation from the maze of false perceptions. Once you realise you are in that maze it alows you to begin questioning the narratives/perceptions that are being offered to you by the groups mentioned above. This then allows you to make your own mind up about whats going on and to then strategise YOUR response to the web of lies.
So going back to what i was saying about people wanting a new perception before they will accept a new one....the people who weave the narratives in for example the mainstream media KNOW this about people...they rely on it for the maze to exist.
By knowing that people have to want liberation from the maze before they will take that step the engineers of perception weave narratives that are comforting to those people...that coset them. You could see the maze also as a form of SLEEP from which many people do not want to awaken.
A good film analogy of this would be the film 'the village' where a group of parents are so hurt by the world that they agree to set up a community in some woods that are cut off from the outside world in order to escape what they call the 'darkness' of our society. They set up their village and they raise their children there but they don't tell their children about the outside world so the children grow up in the village knowing only that world (they are in a perception bubble that the adults have woven around their minds)
In order to keep the children within the village the adults decide that they need a bogeyman to scare the children into remaining near the village so they say that there are creatures out in the forest that will kill them if they stray and they dress up as those creatures to frighten the children. This fear acts as a powerful perceptual bubble on the youngsters and curbs their natural inquisitiveness that would otherwise take them from the village to explore the wider world.
This film was made in the climate of paranoia that existed in the wake of 911 and the Iraq war which was fought under the pretext of fighting 'terror'. 911 created a bogeyman which was 'terrorism' which then kept the public terrified of a perceived outside threat, so that they would respect their government (the adults in the village) and obey them.
This process of creating outside bogeymen has allowed the wealthy in the west to stop the workers from turning on them by giving them an outside threat to worry about so that they instead obey the wealthy.
Howard Zinn expressed this as follows:
“American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor.”
However many people do not understand this or how their perceptions are being created for them. You can speak to people even on this forum who will speak as if they are expressing their own mind when in fact all they are doing is regurgitating the narrative that has been given to them by FOX news. Their ideas are not their own but rather ones implanted into their minds by outside agents.
Just as a person can't quit smoking until they want to....a person cannot let go of old perceptions until they want to. I have not had trouble letting go of old perceptions because I WANT TO FIND FAULT WITH THE SYSTEM. I lost faith in the system a long time ago so i have been looking to find fault with it. This has allowed me to seek out, with an open mind, alternative perceptions. However many people are snuggling into the bosom of the sytem and they don't want to wake up.
Not many people seem to be happy within the system but some still do not want to let go because they are afraid; they often say ''better the devil you know'' as a philosophical justification for holding on tight to the system. Theroux (and later pink floyd) described that condition of holding onto a horrible system as ''living a life of quiet desperation'' (usually involving lots of navel gazing but not much looking up at the wider picture)
I as an individual am not content to live a life of quiet desperation so i willingly shed redundant perceptions on an ongoing journey of evolving perceptions, but some people are in a state of arrested development where they do not want to look beyond the narratives that are woven for them in the mainstream media, which usually revolve around a form of nationalistic, racial or religious tribalism.
The tribalist perception maze revolves around creating identities for people that lump them into groups so that those groups can then be pitted against each other. This keeps the people of the world divided and antagonistic towards each other. So from birth people are given a 'nationality' and taught to love a flag and to obey their government and worship a particular brand of religion.
Many young people will sign up for the military and hand over all decision making (and personla responsibility) to their 'superior' officers because they think being blindly loyal to their government is the right thing to do. By snuggling into the bosom of government however they have stopped themselves from thinking independantly. They are not stopping to think if their government is behaving morally or responsibly....they just keep that perception of their government being the 'good guy' because it cosets them...but in reality it is ignorance at best and at worst it is moral cowardice.
This is why many soldiers later switch from being right wing, flag waving, war mongerers to being left wing, peace protestors because they begin to see through the web of lies their government has woven in order to exploit them and take its pound of flesh from them and their buddies who are left questioning what it is they have bled and suffered for.
A clear example of the weaving of perceptions can be seen at the moment with the various conflicts in the middle east. For example the mainstream media weaves one narrative where we are told that some defenceless yazidis are trapped on a mountain and need to be rescued from a larger military force bent on destroying them but at the same time another narrative is woven where another group, the gazans, are also trapped in a small geographical area and are being menaced by a larger, stronger military force do nopt need to be rescued despite being attacked by a larger military force.
So we are told it is terrible and morally reprehensible to bomb the crap out of one defenceless group but it is ok to bomb the crap out of another defenceless group!
An awakened person who is able to look beyond the narratives knows that it is wrong to bomb the crap out of any defenceless group
So self education frees a person from being manipulated into supporting things that are morally reprehensible or harmful to themselves or others
So educating ourselves is really the beginning of the journey and from then on it becomes an ongoing process that never really ends
I was watching a clip by an ex KGB guy recently where he explains that there has been a deliberate process in the west of feeding the public lots of contradictory information and of splitting people down into groups to the point where people are no longer sure of the ground that they stand on anymore. This demoralises them and makes them easier to manipulate; he calls it 'ideological subversion or psychological warfare':
[video=youtube;R3nXvScRazg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3nXvScRazg[/video]
Full length talk on how to brainwash a nation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
Once a person is awake and aware then they are in a position to begin trying to share information with others that will contradict the official narrative in oreder to provide those people with the opportunity (if they want it) to escape from the maze
As i said earlier in the thread...one person is unlikely to be able to change much in the world but large groups of people can. So one person escaping form the maze is not going to change anything. That person must go back to the maze and assist others to leave the maze in order to affect real change.
Only large numbers of people waking up will be able to change the system.
So stage 1: educate yourself (this process continues from that day forward)
stage 2: share what you have found that helped you breakdown your old perceptions in order to then grow the movement of awakened people
stage 3: use your new understanding of how the world works to begin to pro-actively taking steps towards making change in your life to be the change you want to see in the world
I'm at stage 3 now but i am encountering barriers. The system is designed to make it difficult for people to escape the maze and the system has been refined over many generations to contain previous generations of people like me. So it really is like trying to climb out of a pit of quicksand! However if large groups people try to do it and help each other then it will happen much easier and much quicker....which then returns us to the importance of step 2: spreading awareness (we can't do much alone so we need others who can see what we see)
The internet is providing people with the opportunity to undergo this process on an unprecedented scale. The powers that be who control the maze are threatened by the internet and are seeking to control it more and more so people need to use this window of opportunity now to educate, inform and organise
So to go back to the theme of 'inaction'.....educating yourself is only part of a process. However once you are aware it becomes difficult to not then act on what you know in some way. People will respond to that urge in different ways. Many will take the internet to talk about what they are finding out and by doing so they are moving to stage 2 which is a vital form of action. They will of course meet resistance from those that are hanging on in quiet desperation.
So is it justifiable to unsettle those that want to hang on in quiet desperation? There are a couple of aspects to that....first of all the system is evolving all the time and it is now trying to evolve into an even more draconian prison (totalitarian system) and if people don't wake upto that then their desperation will grow...so the ''ignorance is bliss'' approach will actually make things much worse for them....ie the 'bliss' won't last. The other aspect is that by burying their head in the sand and being inactive they are going to allow you to be dragged deeper into the quicksand of the system because you are going to need their help to resist the system...it's a numbers game
lol
