Means also talks about the high numbers of American Indian children in foster care, and the plight of the poor in America.

Via the Republic of Lakotah blog.

Darian Worden has posted a succinct outline of effective steps anyone can take right now to build liberty in their own lives, and thus to increase the measure of liberty in the world — from the ground up.

Think about what you can do in your personal life to expand freedom – then act on this knowledge.

- Individual Liberty -

A free society is founded on individual liberty.

We have complete liberty when each person is free to do whatever he wills, so long as he does not infringe on the equal freedom of another. The individual’s freedom should not be interfered with until he interferes with another person’s freedom.

Liberty is equal: each person has full authority over her own life, and no person has authority over another. One may influence or persuade others, or agree to have someone take charge of a task. But there can be no social ranking that claims one person inherently owes obedience to another. As much as possible, individuals should have equal decision making power in organizations they choose to work in.

All relations, from the most intimate to the most elaborate, must be based on consent. People must be free to opt out of any social arrangement, and force can only be used against people who forcibly interfere with the liberty of others.

- Personal Liberty -

Creating a free world begins on the most personal level.

If you want to be effective at increasing freedom, your daily activity should be consistent with the principles of individual liberty.

Good people can slip into bad habits. This does not mean they must be condemned to forever be an enemy of freedom. But it does mean that self-improvement is necessary.

When you change yourself, you change the part of the world that you have the most influence over. And your changes will influence those you are in contact with.

Ask:

- How well am I living up to the principles of liberty?

- Do I insist on relating and organizing on a consensual basis that respects individual dignity and desires?

- Do I obey others, or do I obey myself?

- Do I act as if other people should decide the purpose of my life?

- Do I act like other individuals should live for me, not for themselves?

- Do I act like my political, social, or economic rank entitles me to be obeyed?

- Do I hold individuals to different standards because of the categories that other people have thrust upon them – race, gender, sexual preference, immigrant status, etc?

- What can I do in my current situation to expand freedom? Should I put myself in a different situation?

Attitude is very important in working toward liberty. Are you oppressed? Or are you engaged in conflict with people who wish to oppress you? Thinking that you are powerful and free may make it so.

Self-improvement is an everyday process. But you can only start building a free world when you make a conscious effort to enact principles of individual liberty in your daily life.

[...]

Read the rest at Center for a Stateless Society »
Download as a PDF from LibertyActivism.info »

(post photo by vcastelo on flickr)

This is the fifth chapter from Les’ online novel titled, Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter addresses the “reactive mind”, and why controlling emotional responses to triggers from situations or people, is mentally and spiritually beneficial.

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter 5

Let’s talk about the reactive mind today. I see that in the process of writing this book that there are a number of approaches. Thinking about it, it occurred to me that I should intersperse related topics between the topics. That way we can creep up on things like diet, which is coming soon to a justgetthere blog near you and other subjects that won’t be injured by appearing a little later in the game. I like the idea of digressing and bobbing and weaving- more of which will appear when we talk about the martial arts- and stinging like a disappearing honeybee, floating like a butterfly and moon-walking across the stage to the beat of the auctioneers hammer at Neverland.

I can assure you that progress toward real independence and spiritual as well as temporal survival and security, not to mention general, overall well being, are highly dependent upon your control of the ‘reactive mind’. You know what that is right? That’s the part of your mental makeup that reacts to thoughts and words and situations. It triggers emotions and it can wind you up tighter than a Republican’s sphincter without anything more than your getting caught up inside the thoughts inside your head. I realize that using imagery like tight Republican sphincters is a bit of a misnomer given their predilections as viewed in news bites over recent years but you can go ahead and think of it in terms of the personality type instead of otherwise… whatever that might imply.

What I’ve done here- writing this the way I have and using provocative graphics in what is supposed to be a spiritual groove; all high-minded and like that… what I’ve done is to give you an example of the reactive mind inside your head as you read these words and wonder why I said this and that. This is something to keep in mind no matter what you read or feel or see or think or any part of the perceptions you have and the way you manage their interpretations. It’s always good to put yourself inside the mind of the writer and it is possible to get right there too. Just as there is a great deal going on behind the scenes in the world outside, there is also a lot going on behind the scenes of the world inside. Smoke and mirrors work in both directions.

It is my belief that control of the reactive mind is one of the most important issues you can address. Imagine what it would be like to not have your mind automatically react. Imagine what it would be like not to have your buttons pushed by your own thoughts and feelings or the words and actions of others. Imagine what it would be like to be so centered that nothing threw you off balance. It’s not impossible. In fact, it is quite possible. I’m no friend of Scientology and I can assure you they have been no friend to me but I would like to point out that everything they do is about controlling the reactive mind. Unfortunately… it looks more like their controlling it than you controlling it.

The military does this with you. Religions do this with you. Cultures do this with you. Your parents did this to you. Your schools did this to you. Doesn’t it make sense that you should do this to you to offset all the bad programming you ran into? Of course, all of the influences previously mentioned did not leave you with only bad programming. Some of the programming was good. We want to remove the bad programming.

How do you decide which programming is good and which bad? First you must come to some understanding of who you are? Who are you? Based on that you can determine if what you are is an effective representation of who you are. All of the battles you are fighting outside of yourself are based on inner conflicts. We know very little about ourselves and what lies beneath. There are things going on beneath the surface of your mind of which you are completely unaware. There are tangles and pressures and all manner of forces which work their way up into thoughts and words and actions.

You have to put on your tool belt and dive into the deep. Meditation is one way to do this. In the esoteric tarot, card number 17 is “The Star”. It is the card of meditation. Its name is Tzaddi which means ‘fish-hook’. The 12th card is called “The Hanged Man” its name is Mem and it means water or more specifically a body of water, like the sea. The 13th card is called “Death” and its name is Nun and it means a fish. Think about this.

You can take the fish-hook of Meditation and drop it into the great sea of the subconscious and catch and pull out the fish of death. I am not recommending nor discouraging this path. I wish merely to show you that there is a lot more to some things than might appear from cursory examination and the same applies across the board. You can take all of the tenants of Yoga and find them to be resident in the system of Hermetic Science and Alchemy. All of these sciences cross-reference. All of the real systems are complete, comprehensive and perfect. The only thing that is not is you and I and that is because the reactive mind of the personality is making you less than you could be and certainly less than you are.

Remember as we go along that the whole purpose of this book is to introduce you to a community of kindred souls and to provide certain tools that will grant you some protection from the dangers that consume everyone all around and which you can witness and hear about every single day. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The reactive mind makes it nearly impossible to concentrate… to see time for what it is… to gain maximum enjoyment from life and to live and grow infinitely beyond anywhere you may be at the moment.

Treating with the reactive mind is best left for the next chapter. It’s enough for now to know that it exists and to begin to watch how it works. If you make it a point to be observant about how you react through your day, you will see and perceive some interesting occurrences that will cause your mind to point some things out to you that you might not have been paying attention to before.

It is important to realize that life is a magic show in all of the best and worst ways. Life is brimming to overflow with magic and we don’t see it because of the reactive mind. We don’t see the beauty of existence because we are in a continuous reflex mode. Something happens between puberty and adulthood that closes certain doors and the closest we ever get to the spontaneity and openness of our childhood is when senility sets in. We’re supposed to lose our innocence and we are supposed to regain it but…

This book is going to weave in and out of a great many areas. We’re slated for about 35 chapters and we are only on chapter 5. There’s a point to the manner of presentation and a point to the pointing at and to. I’ve nothing against Republicans or anyone unless my reactive mind tells me I do. We have allowed ourselves to become very confused about what is going on and this can be proven to be true just by looking at the dissatisfactions in our lives and the fact that we don’t change the conditions we are in.

This book isn’t for everyone. This book is only for those who want to find a way out of the hamster cage and into the clear living reality of a free human being. The tools to achieve this are available. Few people realize the power in imagination and faith as well as so many qualities we hear about every day and don’t think about. Opportunity abounds and life itself wants you to be prosperous and well. Something is concealing this from the popular mind.

Thank you for the supportive letters. We’ve only just started here and I think you will like where we wind up further along the road.

I’m Coming Back

___

By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

For Earth day, I decided to post this illuminating interview of Joe Rogan speaking about his psychedelic experiences. Some of the things he says are very profound, and resonate with my own thinking of humanity and the controlled paradigm we have all been born in. It can be changed in the blink of an eye by our thoughts alone. I won’t spoil it for you, so sit back and enjoy.

In this interview, Joe Rogan discusses his experiences with DMT and sensory deprivation flotation tanks, while sharing thoughts about 2012 and predictions for the near future. Daniel Pinchbeck, editor of the website RealitySandwich, conducts this thought provoking interview.

This is the first chapter from Les’ online novel title Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter is a basic introduction of  his ideas of a free thinking, off-the-grid, anarcho-capitalist community.

Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World

Chapter 1

There’s no question that we are in dark days where the majority of the people have more difficulty tearing themselves away from their casual entertainments than they are able to muster the energy to contemplate how they got trapped on all that sticky confection in the first place. They’re like rats on a glue board who think it’s just a matter of learning to walk on snowshoes; even if the same shoe is on both feet. But later for the walking dude, something’s coming up that they just can’t miss and something’s coming up after that and one of these days something is going to be coming up that doesn’t miss them because they were too slow to get out of the way and never saw it coming in the first place.

I hate to be an alarmist and one of the reasons I hate it is because few people pay any attention anyway. I’m sure a lot of people, back in the days when you read about historical events in school… I bet a lot of those people always asked themselves, “Well, how come those people didn’t leave?” or “how come those people didn’t do something about it?’ or whatever ‘how come’ might have entered their mind. My question to you is the very same thing. You got an answer for that?

“It’s not the same visible, I don’t care what Frank Zappa told you. It isn’t going to happen here. It can’t happen here.”

The thing is, culture’s rise and fall. That’s a fact, look it up. Is there any culture that is what it once was, when it was? You could make the argument that the English banking system has replaced their navy in terms of ruling the world and you could even parse Churchill’s comment on the British Navy, “founded on buggery and the lash” and say that the same practices are in place. You could say that certain rural locations are going on like they have gone on for thousands of years but… that’s not culture is it? Culture is the thing that blooms in the morning in the hearts of a young and thriving nation and winds up at the back of the icebox in a covered dish by late afternoon.

There’s present time culture which spills into your lap from your TV set and we hope it doesn’t interfere with your masturbating hand and… there’s the culture you see when people dress up in the costumes their parents wore and dance in street fairs for a day or two. There’s the culture that winks at you through the microscope lens from a glass slide and there’s the culture that took your ass for a ride down into Hernado’s Hideaway.

There are all kinds of culture and they all fade and then show up on Halloween or the aforementioned street festivals. You don’t want me to tell you this but your culture is in decline. It’s dancing with dead leaves in a running gutter in a November rain. You got soft. You got fat and you got stupid and those whose industry is based on deceiving and milking you are going to prove hard taskmasters. The good news is that it will get you off your ass. The bad news is that it’s going to mean being a slave for the same parties because you ceased to be your own master when you gave up your vigilance and common sense.

So you think the world you walk through every day is normal? That makes you crazy. Sane minds would question every aspect of it. Do you remember being sane? That’s a hard one because some of you never were but… some of you were. You can’t remember. That’s how it works. Once you get from one point to another over a series of points, the original departure point is lost in swallowing mist. It’s especially hard to remember being sane when you no longer are sane because you began to agree with the madness; just to go along to get along sort of… so that now it is impossible to find your way back.

Look, I’m sane, relatively… even though I was locked up in some very hard institutions; even though I took enormous amounts of drugs, especially psychedelics… even though I drank a river until the river backed off… I’m sane. I’m sane because I never tried to fit in. Well, they wouldn’t let me fit in, would they? But that’s not the point. I didn’t go out of my way to do a Steven Hawkings on myself to see the universe their way. Yoga I like, bad asanas practiced with the idea of being a part of something that is totally wack is not.

What are you going to do now? Some of you are aging and your savings are dwindling and the culture is designed to make you sick because it’s based on bad food and alcohol and a voyeur’s idea of working out and staying fit and the medical people are going to get you and they don’t know what they are doing and they don’t care either. And I- and others like me could gift you with simple remedies but… but… that’s right… no fucking degrees… no suit and tie…. No office and no ad on the side of that bus going by… and most of it is simple and free and boy… do the people looking to enslave your ass hate the idea of anyone giving away something for free; especially when it works and theirs does not.

Well, if you ask me… I’d look for a community somewhere with people who care and aren’t into strange sex and control mechanisms, who want to pool their resources in a libertarian way with all the perks that come with that abiding grace where some special force appears in the midst of them without a lot of bad depressing hymns. That’s what I would do if I were you.

Myself… I’m fine… I left the United States and went to Europe with my guitar and a few talents I have and there I am. I don’t need that community but I wouldn’t mind one… but you… you need it.

I’m going to try to do something nice here. The good people at justgetthere have asked me to come here and write about whatever it was I was writing that got their interest but I’m thinking; why not do it one better and make it useful and personal at the same time? It came to me while I was writing this and… as usual… I had no idea where it was going to wind up. But what I’m going to do is write a book for you. We’ll call it… uh… let’s see… The Practical Survival Guide When your Culture is Going Down the Toilet and you are Hanging on the Rim? Too long… but it’s going to be like what you’ve been reading and it’s going to have current events dissected and little disciplines and commentaries on diet and physical movement as well as circumstantial defense against circumstance that may range from the martial arts to a mindset one can cultivate and including things like Shiatzu and diet and how to adapt to a batshit world and what we’ll do is… I’ll go on my merry way and you will ask me things and I’ll incorporate them into the mix and…

Some twenty or thirty chapters down the road we will have a book and it will be a pretty useful book that moves from Buckminster Fuller to Morihei Ueshiba, from Aldous Huxley to Terrence McKenna, from George Ohsawa to Arnold Ehret and on to Robert Gray. In the meantime we are going to be mindful of events in the windshield and the rear view mirror and by the side of the road we are passing and we are hoping that if you are hitching by the side of the road that… at some point… you are going to catch the ride that is going to take you to the community of which I speak. It may not exist yet but it is there… forming in the ethers… visualized in the focused mind… precipitating down… it’s there pilgrim. And you can get there.

The only question that remains is do you want to go? If so, then we will have a little journey here and we shall see what we come up with. Hey… I’d like to see it happen too. I may not hang around but I will help you build it. You have my word on that. So… as will prove to be the usual thing, I will close with a song.

Iridescent Dreams

___

By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

Our featured author Les Visible helped kickoff the launch of our sister site JustGetThere.us 2 years ago. Over the course of months, Les graciously crafted an online novel that explores the connections between our physical environment and our metaphysical being, and ways to achieve harmony between the two. The chapters contain very useful information for getting off-the-grid mentally, so I will be posting these articles to this site due to the relevance of the material.

Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World

I’m trying to make my way, with as much care as possible, past the stacked appliances and two by fours; men in hard hats coming and going. It’s the usual scene when a new website gets close to launch time. It pays to move carefully for awhile because there are bound to be loose fittings and unexpected drops to floors below.

So I’m not going to say too much the first time out except to say, “Welcome, and thank you for coming by. I hope I can hold up my end of things and that you will be either more informed or more entertained than you were before you arrived.”

I’m going to be talking about geopolitical and social issues as well as metaphysics and trying to tie in visible effects with invisible causes. There’s a good chance that I’ll take unannounced side trips off into the bush, just to see what’s out there; or in there as the case may be and the conversation may even turn to books and movies on occasion.

I expect that a good deal of it is going to be controversial because the preponderance of lies set loose in the world is enormous and presently exceeds the known population of the Earth, even if you include the animals and the insects. One could make a case that you can hardly see anything at all for the lies that threaten to blot out the skies with their batwings of darkness.

I’d like to think that I’ll have an opportunity to present what I believe to be the truth whenever I get around to presenting anything at all. I also hope that you will be assured by my statement, coming up any moment now, which is that, “I’m wide open to being corrected and proven wrong should the unexpected occur.”

I feel a dull sense of fatigue settle over my frame every time I make the mistake of traveling to any mass media web presence with the intention of seeing what kind of thinly veiled bullshit they are up to today. I always knew that sham and artifice was a major product of the world’s business but these days it sometimes seems like its only product.

I’ve known that politicians lie for a good long time now and that they get up to gratuitous wars and profit from the industry all through the screams and the blood and the tears but… I never suspected that terrible psychopaths… bio-engineered serial killers, vat born in underground labs beneath Disney World would take over the United States government and, joining with psychopaths in other countries, conspire to attack a major American city, as well as various public buildings and a defenseless meadow in Pennsylvania.

We’ve come a long way from Romeo and Juliet to ‘bitches’ and ‘ho’s’. In a single generation, with the help of “No Child Left with a Mind”, millions of the world’s young have been turned into text-messaging robots. It’s an ‘LOL’ world baby.

The juries out on whether aliens have invaded and occupied the minds of most of the population but there can no longer be any question that the GWEN network is responsible for mind-numbing subliminal programming of some sort, or it’s in the water, or it’s in the air, or it’s in the food.

Food and water shortages loom on the horizon but that may be a mercy, given what many people eat by choice each day.

Hate, suspicion, disillusionment and despair, prowl like gang-bangers across the landscape; is it really that bad? Yes and no.

As always when one world is decomposing and recycling, another world is rising from the ruins of the last. I’m an optimist, though you may hear me say some hard things and occasionally start riffing out Jeremiads like I was scat-singing with a deranged jazz band. I’d like to think it’s all about saying, “Wake up and smell the bodies burning.”

I’ll try to inspire as much as I deride. There’s going to be ample non-politically correct content and the thought police are going to get to plump up their dossier on me but… you tell me. Is it better to bow your head before merciless creatures that possess neither heart nor soul or should one stand fast against the darkness with “this little light of mine”?

I don’t know who is going to show up here or where this temporary space in a temporary world that hangs suspended in an eternal mind is going to go but it will be something to do until the next thing comes along.

There’s an old Sufi tale about the constructs and presentations of life. The tale pretty much says that when a particular scene is called for that certain energies appear which erect the stage and then the performance goes down. Once the performance is over they roll it all up and head on out of town.

I’m hoping you’ll travel a little ways on up and around the bend inside this mind of ours and see where it takes us. I’m hoping that somewhere along the way it will be common knowledge to us all that there is only one mind and that we may all be the same person as well but that we appear to be different so that the spectacle can have some mystery.

These are scary times. They are also exciting times. It’s possible to be a hero or a villain. It’s possible to help or hinder however you are disposed to do. I know that the human heart is a kingdom of infinite surprise and I have no idea what is hidden there in these times. I’m hoping something greater is going to wake up in our midst and I am hoping we will recognize it and rally round for the good of one and all.

It will be my pleasure to travel along with you as we explore what can be seen from the window while driving by. I’ll let you know what I think and you can let me know what you think too. I look forward to it. Until the next time, remember, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there and just because you can doesn’t mean it is.

I’ll leave you with a song.

My Pickup Truck Got Pregnant

and if you want to read more
Smoking Mirrors
_____

By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com