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.

[painter]

You probably noticed that I changed this topic's title from "Learning how to read" to "Learning how to be free." Personally, I like the first title better but it seems people are getting caught up in the "read" part of it when, as I've said, to me the important part is the "learning". In any case, let me state from the start that there is no difference: A man who is not free does not know how to read.

I want to point everyone to a recent thread by Lasthorseman which expresses two things relevant to the topic at hand. Within it he quotes at some length another author who is talking about the multitude of "veils" through which one must pass to achieve genuine freedom. Moreover, within his OP, Lasthorseman gives at least two examples of at least relative, if momentary, "freedom". That is, examples of a quality of self awareness within which he knew something, understood something, about himself. He did not read this in any book.

By passing through the 9/11 looking glass, all of us here have arrived at a certain understanding about the true nature of our relationship to the social environment within which we find ourselves: We are not free. Or, put differently, we are "free" relatively, within limits -- most of which remain invisible to us. We are all conditioned by and dependent upon a complex social system over which we have limited control and possibly even less understanding. Having passed through this looking glass, however, we now find ourselves looking at the world and ourselves in it quite differently than we did before. Where before, perhaps, if someone were to have pointed out to us that we are not free, we might not have believed them, might have derided them as "crazy" and might have pointed to any number of examples as evidence that we are, in fact, free. But now that sense of more or less certainty has vanished and we find ourselves in a kind of prison populated primarily with fellow inmates who have little to no knowledge of their confines or jailers and, consequently, have little or no interest in insurrection, much less escape.

The possibility of escape is what I'm attempting to offer. But I'm full aware, as each of you should be by now, that a man can not escape a prison he does not see. What I have to offer is the "red pill" that shows us just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Shows us, if you will, that the prison is not only something "out there" in the world of events and bogus Illuminati: It is within us. And none of us can escape this prison who has not seen it and tried to pry apart the bars.

There is a way out, however, because "freedom" is our birthright. The incarceration that we share is not natural to us and, deep, deep within, somehow we know this -- that "splinter in the mind" that keeps us searching for a "truth" that can not be spoken, only known.

PS: If thought and habit are the cinder blocks and the bars, attention is the key.