Learning How To Be Free: An Invitation, from a painter Options

[painter]

NOTE: The original Topic Title of this thread was "Learning How To Read . . ." but I've changed it in hopes that we can begin to escape the literal associations of the word "read". If "free" suffers the same fate, I may change the Title yet again.

I've been thinking about this for a long time. Months.

Over the course of being a member of this forum, especially in the context of "Alternative Theories," I've occasionally mentioned the necessity of "knowing how to read." Of course what I mean by this isn't directly related to knowing how to read the words you see before you here. All of us know how to do that more or less. If you're not familiar with my having said anything about this, I point you specifically to this post on my pinned and closed 'esoteric' thread here: http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum//index....t&p=7894218

A few members of this forum have asked me to say more about what I mean by this "learning how to read" business and it is this that I've been contemplating for a long time now. Having given it some serious consideration I've decided to post and pin this thread here as an open "invitation."

First I am inviting you to engage with me and one another in some discussion here about this topic. However, I am very aware that discussion of this topic is by necessity limited so long as it remains nothing more than discussion. To go further requires something more of us: Specifically a willingness to engage in exercises and experiments which can begin to move us beyond mere discussion into the realm of actual experience and knowledge based upon that experience.

This invitation, therefore, is offered as a starting point in the hope that some of you may wish to go further and take all this to another level. All I will say about that at this point is that the possibility exists, although necessarily limited by this forum/text medium within which we correspond. For this purpose I'm in the process of establishing another forum, participation in which will be by invitation only and will require that users not be anonymous and have a genuine interest in coming to a more direct understanding through observation.

So, I will leave this as it is. Feel free to ask whatever questions you wish and we'll see how this goes.

[lunk]

Personality can exist without conscious memory.
I've seen it before,
memory fades but the personality and the character,
still remain.
I've also heard the statement that mountains will rise and crumble.
seas will rise and evaporate to nothing , but people don't change.

So, I think that there is a unique force, to, and inside, each individual,
that remains constant at least life long, that leaves here, after that.

English is a difficult language to find words for this kind of topic.

That force is our essence, and it is no different in potential than anyone elses.
I think that although the potential being the same, is often explained as us, being
all the same, or one, and that, I think, is untrue.

...and this may be at the heart of the entire situation.

If one can be convinced that they are not a whole to themselves
and only a fraction to the entire population,
their potential is vastly diminished,
allowing for someone else to do the dividing.

imo, lunk

my mind is wandering again

[Christophera]

Yup, you're an ornery old bastard painter! (IMG:http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/style_emoticons/default/laughing1.gif) Just kidding- but I had to take that one (and some might consider that a compliment coming from me). (IMG:http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

You mean he knows how to start a thread difficult to stay on topic with, or, .... a thread which is dificult to define the topic of. A challenge is a good thing! Particuarly in this area of knowing ourselves, our humanity and its potentials or extents.

lunk posts a point which I recognize.

Personality can exist without conscious memory.
I've seen it before,
memory fades but the personality and the character,
still remain.

The phylogenetic DNA is of the unconscious. Patterns of response based on stimuli that have nothing to do with the present and are a compilation of past experiences encoded into our ancestors by their life experiences and perhaps carried into the ether (see link below as to "how carried") to be reactivated/returned to existence by the compatibility/similarity of our genetic structure to that of our ancestors.

English is a difficult language to find words for this kind of topic.

I've considered that english was derived/developed from its base in order to prevent finding words on this topic. Kidding!

If we were shaman sitting in a cave 10,000 years ago, we would have less problems inventing the words we needed while being in agreement of the definitions. Most of those people were hunted down and exterminated, prevented from speaking their languages.

That force is our essence, and it is no different in potential than anyone elses.
I think that although the potential being the same, is often explained as us, being
all the same, or one, and that, I think, is untrue.

...and this may be at the heart of the entire situation.

If one can be convinced that they are not a whole to themselves
and only a fraction to the entire population,
their potential is vastly diminished,
allowing for someone else to do the dividing.

imo, lunk

my mind is wandering again

There may be more than one intrinsic force. One which is just the carrier of the other. The other is an individual energy riding on the force of life.

I've considered that basic force as "mitogenetic radiation". In the way I've presented it here, our individualality would be inherited and encoded upon our life. That life provides us a connection to a universal whole and represents a way and opportunity for certain mixing of intention and knowledg into our individual exsitences.


http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/arti...itogenetic.html

Gurwitsch's work, like that of his great Ukrainian-Russian scientific contemporary Vernadsky, was a direct outgrowth of the work of Louis Pasteur, and ultimately of Kepler and Leibniz. Exactly for that reason, it was systematically suppressed; both in the West—where the Rockefeller Foundation directly targetted Gurwitsch's and related work from the late 1920s on, as a threat to its promotion of reductionist "molecular biology"—and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the Soviet Union itself.

Ironically, we see that the main economic proponent of the WTC was involved with supression of the knowledge.

This post has been edited by Christophera: Oct 30 2008, 01:25 PM

[Sanders]

... a thread which is difficult to define the topic of. A challenge is a good thing!

Good observation.

Painter's been talking about this stuff about as long as I've been rambling on about my dragon-blood-line. (IMG:http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

I'll admit, I read a few posts however-long back and didn't really connect with the content. But I've been thinking about this more, and it occurred to me that my own personal experience in learning Japanese relates directly to this thread ... so I thought I'd "share".

(I put that word in parenthesis because I abhor it so ... but I suppose it's well suited here.)

Japanese and English are so totally different in structure that one cannot think in one language and talk in the other - it's just not possible beyond a pre-school level of speech. In order to speak in Japanese, one must learn to think in Japanese.

When I first came to Japan and had been studying a while, I became friends with a guy who spoke both languages fluently, and I was bothering him constantly with questions .... "how to you say this in Japanese???". Often his response was, "hmmmm, hmmmm, you don't really ever say that in Japanese. Nope, you can't really translate that."

That happened over and over, and I began to think Japanese was a sucky language, with no depth. But I was in Japan, so I learned it anyway.

Years later, after I was more or less fluent, my Japanese friends would often ask me, "hey, how do you say this in English???". And I would respond, "hmmmm, hmmmm, you don't really ever say that in English. Nope, you can't really translate that."

The point is, the two languages are squewed - there are areas that don't intersect. In order to understand certain words, you have to experience their meanings - I'm talking about experiences/feelings/meanings that are well understood in one culture - enough to require a word to describe it - but not in another. I'm sure this is true for any comparison of two languages/cultures, but I can't imagine any two that are more different than Japanese and English.

(BTW - many are aware that the Japanese incorporate a lot of English words into their language - that is true .... but it's no help! They call a convertible an "open-car" ... first time I heard that I thought someone forgot to lock their car-door!)

Anyway ....

As I became proficient in Japanese, I noticed there were two me's. The Japanese language, with its crazy obsession with politeness levels and protocol, rendered a new "me" who thought in Japanese and was somewhat different than the "me" that thought and talked in English. I know this for a fact because I felt it, it was very disturbing, and, when Japanese friends witnessed me hanging out with English speakers they always commented that I appeared to be a different person. It took years to integrate the two "me's".

It made me painfully aware of how interlocked the language we think in, and what we think, and who we "think" we are, are interlocked. Language is a half-@ss attempt at a common system of communication that everyone can understand ... the downside is, we think in words, and are unable to think of things that those "set" words and phrases can't already describe. I know this because I have learned new "meanings" - connected to experiences. that are not readily expressible in the English language. There is a Japanese character, pronounced "En", which when you say it in Japan everyone knows exactly what you are talking about, yet it would take a whole paragraph (or a page for that matter) to explain it in an English dictionary.

To think without words? Seems difficult - if not impossible - but potentially liberating to what degree I can't imagine. My experiences with the two languages, and the fact that I work in music, which is a sort of "geometric" language in and all to itself, makes me think that, while more than likely unattainable, it's the right direction to point toward. Words, after all, are inventions - and while they can be incredibly useful for communication, they also limit the range of thought ... I wouldn't call language a prison, and I think freedom and beauty and all that sort of stuff can probably best be found within the confines of a defined medium .... but thinking without using a pre-determined and sometimes woefully inadequate (as I found out learning a very different language) system of words to form thoughts ... is something I'm very interested in.