So, what is personal sovereignty? Plain and simple, just being you, or more the you would want to be if you were not busy running in the proverbial rat race. Being you is being part of something beyond yourself without losing your individualism and being mindful of all life. The consumer paradigm is designed to make you a controllable and mindless consumer. Literally, hundreds of millions of people have fallen in to that trap and billions more, living in developing countries, have a warped view of consumerism and have bought into that mindset based on observing the affluence they think they see. It’s all a beautiful sham being driven by corporate greed. And that in turn is driven by a hierarchy bent of controlling everything. We need to take back the colonialization of our public systems that have been taken over by vested interests not compatible with our common good, e.g. The internet for starters. It is encouraging to see independent platforms emerging (much like MeWe) in response to the hard censorship being used by platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
If you can be mindful, one day you wake up and see the man behind the curtain. That can be really disconcerting. We tend to see the world in a dualistic black and right way, good/bad, right/wrong, them/us, etc., but it is really all grey. Once you look at beliefs and belief structures (including your own) with a critical eye you recognize these dualities as merely alternative perspectives that we give value or validity to or decline value and invalidate, as the case may be. I was re-reading ‘Illusions’ by Richard Bach, and he comes out with a simple counter to absolutism. The Golden Rule is ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ but what if you were a masochist or worse, a pathological sadist. The Golden Rule assumes that everybody is good to start with. Personally, I think that most people are inherently good and would live with integrity in a fair and equitable world in how we understand the broader notion of being good. But there are a small minority who are distinctly psychopathic, and sadly, it is this very small group that currently dominates our global thinking.
It is too easy to fall in despair and think that you have no power. Yet, if you recognize just what an incredible person you are, with all your foibles and uniqueness as an individual, then you can learn to accept yourself and everyone else as OK as they are. We spend so much time judging and blaming that we forget to be ourselves and to let others be themselves. That is a spiritual perspective of course and one based on Love, compassion and understanding. The ego however, is based on fear and perceived need. The ego is self-seeking. A spiritual person is inspired in what they do. Our lives are driven by the scripted reality imposed on us by the mainstream media. We have to learn how to live through our own intentions and not through the impulses driven by an external system bent on controlling us. It’s the difference between unconscious mindlessness and mindful free-will. It’s a case of understanding what truth means for you from that deep internal place of integrity versus following the herd mindset simply because everyone else believes it. Your personal sovereignty is your greatest gift. We can only achieve unity when we stop trying to dominate another person, whether that be physically, mentally, or spiritually. So many of our social and cultural institutions exist solely to control our thinking. Think about how our current educational and religious institutions, indeed our whole society and cultures are fixated on teaching the right thing according to the hierarchy.
We are rarely taught how to think, but instead taught what to think. And the systems are set up to punish, chastise, and ridicule those who think outside the lines. We each have a moral compass but for many it is corrupted by the constant need to blame others for their faults, and hence our blame others for our own faults. Our belief structures dictate the dualistic boundaries of what we perceive. And many of those belief structures come via the ‘experts’ we accept as paragons of truth.
Any person who has worked within academia will know how acrimonious it is to do research and become an ‘expert.’ While there are some really open-minded academic people to be found, most are trapped within their ego’s, fighting to be accepted by their peers. Sadly, this has the effect of creating an academic environment that is often defined by cognitive arrogance and closed mindedness to anything not part of the accepted orthodoxy. Indeed, if you develop a well-constructed and persuasive set of ideas and hypotheses that contradict the orthodoxy and you persist, then you risk career suicide. It isn’t that experts within orthodoxy are nasty per se, but they are unwilling to entertain anything that goes against their beliefs. And since modern living is so technological, it shouldn’t be surprising that experts and technocrats zealously guard their beliefs with terms like crackpot, pseudoscientist, conspiracy theorist, etc. to discredit alternative thinkers from the orthodoxy. What makes it hard for the ‘layperson’ is to try and be mindful and discerning of all other perspectives when the orthodoxy so often venomously rejects such alternative views with blatant disregard. I see technocrats and academics more and more now starting to buck the system and reject orthodoxy and to follow their own intuition. Areas from farming, nutrition, holistic medicine, energy generation, and technology in general through to archaeology, anthropology, and sociology are breaking from the dogmatism and starting to question things that have until recently been taboo to even discuss.
I’ve rambled a little more this week. But, let me return to the title of this post – mindfulness and personal truth. There are more than 7.8 billon people on this planet and everyone of them has either their personal truth or lives a truth given to them. Sadly, most (maybe 95%) live a conditioned truth. The wonderful news is that perhaps 15% are waking up and are finding out that they are significant in their own unique way. Many more are following as they see the way that they are being controlled. The beginning of that recognition is also the beginning of a continuous mindfulness of what life is and what it can mean.
To Be Continued ……………………….
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