"Brain" is not "MIND". Your mind is experiencing this one life and its brain for a very short time. You get a few years as a child to have a chance at forming a good body, if your parents treat you well. And then you try for a good set of emotions. If you are emotionally whole that means you got past the terrible twos. At that age a child realizes it is very dependent on its parents. But still, if the mother nurtures the child sufficiently, it can make a break for some emotional autonomy at two years old. Then around the age of eight you reach the age of reason. You get a few years in school to get a chance at programming the brain how to think and to figure out who you are this lifetime and what it is you believe. We must be taught how to use the mortal brain but we do not need to be so rigidly programmed that we never think for ourselves.
I remember a ton of memorization where too much of what I was doing was trying to remember what general won what battle in what place at what time for my country. And how good that country was because it gave me freedom. What freedom? The freedom to have one's brain programmed to think thoughts that said that one should die for freedom. And one should live for the memorization of that fact, not for the exercise of that fact. If I had freedom then I should have been taught different ideas of what freedom might mean in different sets of circumstances and how I might choose this or that action based on what I thought was the best way to exercise my so called freedom. But to investigate various choices and ideas of exactly how to use freedom as something I might choose to define by my self-chosen actions? This was not taught.
Freedom seemed to be merely the choice to defy authority or to choose obedience to authority. Sorry but I do not define freedom that way.
Freedom is the choice of wether to go along with authority if it seems ethical and moral to do so, and simultaneously the right to defy that authority if that seems more correct in the particular circumstance, in ways that if investigated would prove to be choices of immense variety. Freedom is not routine surrender and occasional defiance. Freedom is the creation of a totally original life in and of itself.
We can not live wholly within the context of one social/political venue and be ourselves. Ideally our freedoms should be independent and sometimes interdependent with a given system but not dependent on and cow towing in total abject obedience to any system. Most of the time things do not need to be a matter of an either/or of abject servitude or violent rebellion. But sometimes extreme rebellion is necesssary.
Most of the time the social/political system will augment our freedoms but not always. All this was not alluded to in school as we read the United States constitution. The application of those principles of the hows and whys of citizen freedoms was not developed.
If one were taught the different ways of using freedom one might have been able to think ahead about how to live an adult life and what different choices there were. For many of us there were and are few real choices.
I was taught in school to be a memorization machine, to have a mind that was a thing like a blank page human culture could write on. I was supposed to be an encyclopedia of trivia. My mind balked. I went into hysterical amnesia to block out the meaninglessness. Then it was really tough to remember the trivia and to be able to regurgitate it on test pages when asked. I had nightmares about the whole thing. But I did figure out a working solution. I found that if I concentrated on the gist of what was being taught and forgot the trivia I could learn something worth learning and I would retain accidentally just enough information to get a passing grade. It was a kind of torture to come that close to failure all the time but it was a solution that allowed me to own my own mind.
I was a whiz at IQ tests. I was at the top of my class. I had learned how to think. But I learned it defying the rules as much as possible and forgetting test results and grades. For me thinking evolved as I rejected most of what I was being taught. And I am proud of it.
We live in the end time of a certain cultural phase of human existence. To have a programmed brain molded totally by the school system is not a good thing. One must find a way to think for oneself especially in times like now when we really need to learn to occupy our own thoughts and brains and to bring into expression the full blossoming of something we own past this lifetime and that is our minds. Mind and brain is not the same thing. Our minds and brains in unison, well occupied and well exercised, must now create a new culture as the current one dies and our deeply programmed brains may get in the way.
Anarchy and total citizen participation are opposite extremes. The way we act can be a very nice merger of the two so that we express ourselves independently and we fit in to the given system to act interdependently as well. It does not have to be an either/or most of the time. We need to develop some originality and autonomy. My MIND is my own inner brain police and only it tells me how to think. This is the only thing my brain ultimately listens to.
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