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.

[greenrayriver]

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.

I was institutionalized in an American public school. My entire childhood wasted, while I dreamed and looked out the window. I resented that “education”. I then rejected educational brainwashing for my 4 children. Coming up with the motto that, “if someone was gonna fuck up my kids…it might as well be me, since only I love them, and I have their best interest at heart”. Taking personal responsibility for doing things differently than the so called norm when it came to what I wanted my children to learn from me.
Learning is like breathing and eating, you will do it. When a woman is breastfeeding her child, their faces are about 16 inches apart, you are definitely learning on a level you have no control over. It is so primal and evolved, (we are mammals after all). From the moment of birth when baby bonds and imprints, and the baby puts faces to the voices, after listening for months, learning is taking place. Learning what is safe to learn. Learning through touch, being carried on the mothers body. Knowing every event through the physicality of the mothers movements. Survival depends on developing impulses, jump right toward the safety of the trees or left into a tigers mouth. Music and dance innate in each footstep of the mothers grace. And that is just for starters. Learning by living, using nature as a guide. Staying connected human to human, skin to skin. Is it over simplifying to say if you don’t learn naturally, you must compensate unnaturally? Propping a formula filled bottle in a baby’s mouth, and walking away, sends a message…baby reads it loud and clear. You are on your own baby. There may be a right way and a wrong way to learn. Everything else hinges on that beginning, right brain/right breast, switch sides, left brain/left breast. Breastfeeding might seem like it is off the topic of intellect, but to me its not. Breastfed babies have higher IQ’s. Yet breastfeeding is taboo. A woman being available to actually hold the baby, and feed the baby, does not fit into what society deems important. Careers are encouraged, but never a career in mothering. The breast is universal, crossing all language barriers, across time, unused and misrepresented. Talk about dumbing down, from cradle to grave. Break the bond that ties. Create neurotics, you can control. Instead of well adjusted individuals who know how to read the writing on the wall.