it's in the computer?

I was raised to be a freethinker. I was told that you should never take anything for granted, and that you can come to your own conclusions. I think really most importantly is, your conclusions are the only conclusions. I have spoken to this earlier, but not really in those words. I feel that many of my ideas are all brothers and sisters and that I should be a able to track back down the family tree to a small grouping of ideas. And I suppose this is true, but when you get to those small groupings you can never say everything that you want to, without going into the corollaries of the aunts, cousins, and great-step-nephew by marriage, twice removed.

This leads me to believe that we can not understand the root ideas fully without breaking it down into other terms, which make enough sense given our ape brains. So just like our parents re terming fornication into birds and bees, the whole human race has to break down the big picture just so we can grasp our mind around it.

This doesn't really concern me too much. I have come to terms with the fact that some things just have no explanation. Things that happen by miraculous forces are worth contemplation but don't break your mind over them.

I think of it in this way, you are like a hand and all the great unknown is like a brick wall. The hand can keep slamming against the brink wall for a time, but eventually it is just not going to be pleasant anymore. After you have stopped and rested long enough, you can heal and then start slamming that wall again. But every time you hit that wall there is a bit of permanent damage that will never heal. So if you keep at it long enough, pretty soon your hand wont work at all and that wall wont even have a crack. So the sooner you except that the wall is just stronger, and some things cant be explained, the less you are going to suffer.

Now the other option when your hand stops working is to switch hands, and then when that stops working start kicking, and then when that stops working start kneeing, and then when that stops working start head butting, and then when that stops working just throw your body against the wall, and then when you cant even do that- all your left with is a lot of pain and still no more understanding. And on top of that you have been at this wall for the majority of your life, and you really have no idea what other walls are out there.

Just because you cannot understand doesn't mean that you cant appreciate. So if you come up to a wall, smack it once real hard and it doesn't break, take a moment look it over and say "hmm..... thats interesting" and go look at another wall. You don't have to tear everything down to the building blocks to learn from it and apply it to your life.

Other times you keep at it, and break it down into what you can understand and then it isn't beautiful and amazing anymore. It is like a magic trick, once you know how it is done there is no more wonder, and the subject becomes boring. And unfortunately once you know the trick there is no going back, it will never look the same to you again.

As with everything I have talked about there are a lot of intricacies with this as well. Which walls are worth breaking down? What is a wall, what is a sheet? What if I just cant get around this wall no matter what I try? Those are questions that I cant answer, and wont even try, and besides that kind of takes all the fun out of it, Right?

So hopefully now you can start to see the benefits of being a freethinker.

Freethinkers have banded together for probably all of human existence and just in recent times we have called them conservationists, students, artists, beat poets, jazz musicians, and hippies. The one powerful thing that they have in common is the thought that we is much bigger and important that me. If every person started worrying about his fellow people, then we would have have hundreds of people worrying about a single persons well being, not just a single person concerned only with a single person.

This is certainly idealistic, and maybe it is even an unachievable Utopia. But I think that even small steps towards the unattainable is better than just turning your back and saying "oh well, that will never happen". Well, I stuck myself- here is an answer to what I said I wouldn't answer. Some walls are only walls because we have been told that they are walls, but if you could get enough people pushing on that wall at the same time it might crumble. And even if the remains standing, would you think it better to be pushing against a wall with others, or spend your time pushing against others just trying to get to the wall?

Ha, take that. No more answers for you.

Another great free thought through the ages -- inside of any person, place or thing is everything. If you can look at something, no matter how big or small, with the right eyes you can see everything that is, was or ever will be. This is something that is hard to digest at first, but with closer inspection it can be seen that this has been a commonly held belief among freethinkers for a long time.

Lets take for example the jazz gurus. The truly dedicated all pour their lives into the music, put everything they have into getting that one beat, that one swing, that one moment where everything comes into place and it is perfect. They feel that they can get everything they need out of those moments, and nothing else matters. Obviously, they cant eat the sounds and no living breathing child came from an errant musician fucking his sax. But they achieve total fulfillment, serenity, calm, and reason to live just from those special moments when they can see and make sense of everything, through the music. This could also be said of artists with their life work, students with their potential futures, or great inventors and thinkers with the handful of "lighting bolts" that defines their careers.

Hippies had peace and their drugs. So maybe not as good as music, but music is certainly beter on drugs, or so I have heard. I my mind it goes something like this-"Man, when I took the LSD, I sat a saw the entire universe, through a rose bud, and then I knew, that the whole world could all live in harmony, all of the different colors, creeds and religions, could all live together, if we all just took some LSD, and sat around, singing and carrying on, with peace in out hearts."

I am sure that not all self proclaimed hippies thought this way, but it was the public image that they put out. And I think that it worked for many people, and they found what it was they were looking for. But unfortunately in the 60's everything that had to do with freethinking became attached to the hippies in the public eye. And that turned out to be a problem. There is a laundry list of reasons why the government disliked the movement (I wont do into the theories here, and really you should probably talk to someone who was alive then for a better idea), but regardless hippies became public enemy number one.

This was a huge set back for free thinking. Because now most people were coming into contact with hippies and thus free thinking, at least in the States, through public service warnings about the danger that drugs and radical ideas posed to the "gullible, and innocent" youth of the country. For the most part the majority of the people were never able to make up their own minds about the hippies because the guys in charge felt threatened, and made sure to spread the worst aspects of hippies to every corner of the land. And really the government and corporations had good reason to feel threatened. This whole love revolution had gotten the people to start thinking for themselves again, and as we know the power rest with the people, and people that think for themselves are hard to control.

It is unfortunate that the new movement thrived on free love, drugs, and making a change, because those were easy to point out and "See, see that. Is that what your mother taught you? They are wrong, and dangerous." Even though I feel that the whole movement and idea was that you are free to think for yourself, it got covered over with an easy target and was blasted out of the water before people could figure out what was really going on.

But I am not mad at the hippies, or upset by the downfall of free thinking at that time. They paved the way for a much larger change of guard, and pointed out some pitfalls to avoid. And I think more importantly, people have learned that sometimes it is better to wait things out than to act rashly and harshly against new ideas. Well, OK, maybe we are still learning that, but the gospel is spreading, and this time I don't think that anyone will have the footing or desire to cut it down.

But as with any major change there is going to be a major slip up before we feel it necessary to re-evaluate, and while I think that we have slipped and are falling, we are no where near bottom.

So at this point, hang on tight because we are in for a ride and we must all have faith. Eventually things can and will get better.

Cazart, I just got out of school and want a job, why do we have to do this now??

Thank you to Jerry Levitan and "I met the Walrus" for leading me to this.
There is a great youtube video for it. Check it out.

And while the hippies may have needed psychedelics to come to terms with what was around them, our minds were the true cause and creator of those visions, and drugs are just the easy way to get in touch with that. It is all in there if you take the time to look for it.