WHAT IT MEANS TO BE FREE (THE END OF LEFTISM VS CONSERVATISM)

On a warm summer day in 2008, while the Lehman Brothers fallout loomed, a fellow consciousness seeker invited me to the C.G. Jung Institute of New York on 39th and Park Ave. Having both been raised in the chaos and violence of NYC and coming from immigrant families, we sought healing modalities wherever we could find them.

I remember the old lobby, shuffling into a small book-filled room to attend a class on healing through visualization. I was more skeptical than him, but a few moments into the lecture, we were asked to all think of our pain and problems. Some could be heard sniffling, and a few tears started to flow. The instructor then asked us to carry that weight in front of us and slowly put it down on the floor by our feet. Tears turned into a few chuckles, and soon, we opened our eyes and felt a palpable release.

The instructor taught us the power of visualization to move our perspective of our pain and turn it into a tangible object. It allowed us to place it somewhere: the ground beneath our feet, and take one step back. This practice is beneficial for trauma victims, similar to Cognitive Based Therapies. Seeing our pain as something we can let go of is a powerful technique in healing. You can harness the power of epigenetics, take the static pain in our soul body, and transfer it out of us like a million needles melted down into a ball. We can then set that ball on the floor and simply walk away.

Freedom must be the ability to see life as it is without coercion. Freedom must then be the ability to discover and learn new things without the possession of the mind coercing one towards desperate conformity. If we reject the advances of a totalitarian, we have shown courage. If we have been brutalized by an authoritarian, then we must free ourselves from the pain and suffering. If we are free, we are free from desire or pain.

That is to say, we do not need to feed our ego when we say we are truth-seeking, and likewise, we do not act like Pavlov’s caged dogs, held prisoner in our minds. Freedom is freedom from good or bad. It is simply to see what is. Freedom, in a sense, is the ability to conquer possession of our psyche by our tormentor. It is often the unhealed that seek authority and anguish in conformity. These are the tricks offered for healing, but like fake food, they never nourish you. They actually make you sick. Freedom without this satanism can begin a life. Life can begin at any time, at any age, and it can flower.

Seeing what it is as it is is an exceptional mind, a free mind, and a life-seeking mind. Between our thoughts that are firing off like fireworks is a silent night. You are that sky, and thoughts are simply passing by. When we control and steady our breath, we can begin to let go of our desperation. The monkey mind that is resolving, assorting, categorizing. Make that monkey mind sort and hold each breath. Put it to task so it may shrink; we begin to lose the need once the breath is mastered.

The loss of need is slow. The dopamine receptors shrink, and the anxiety is told to hush. We experience a resonance that the world is in tune with. “To live in the eternal present there must be death to the past, to memory. In this death, there is timeless renewal,” as Krishnamurti explains.

The possessions of our psyche make us servants to ideas from other fields of awareness or collective pain. But to be truly free, we must be willing to let go of our uniform. We must be willing to let go of the need to be caught in the pendulum for or against anti-or-pro. The ability to only bear witness is the hardest thing for our mind. We of course, all experience pain at some point or another. Some of us build our entire existence around not feeling that pain, so we buy and consume until we have built a mountain of things to avoid the center of our universe, which is us from a psychological perspective.

We turn to identity, and we become communists, punks, or war-mongering nationalists. We are driven by mammalian instincts to choose a side and build a trench. However, higher consciousness is freedom from this tribal ritual.

It is freedom from being the cunning fool presenting as an uber-intellectual. Journalist Christopher Hitchens echoed this sentiment: "For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color, let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely, the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty."

The supposed intellectual who has built an anti-identity, the Punk or Non-Binary, always seems to arrive at new ground beyond the masses, only to serve a new master. In “Freedom of Values,” Berman echos the dilemma of what he calls “Negative identity,” stating, “Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis, and the new nation [the US] certainly did. . . . The downside . . . is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real.”

Freedom, of course, is the ability to observe without the need to serve; it is like an endless river to awareness. This is the tao of being. Buddhists call it Attachment, but it is the same concept.

Most people are creators of their Illusions and are the glue that holds together the illusions of greater society. We confuse the symbol with what we believe to be what is. But the man or woman who is alone and detached from the programming of self and the programming of society is without distortion.

They are in the center of their awareness, not blinded by it or led astray; they are in their tao of being because what is simply is. Consciousness is neither a desperate whim to conform nor a desperate desire to burn down the monuments of conformity, however useful that may be in a dark collective that holds the gun to your head and says, "Believe what we tell you." What comes after the identity is gone? This is my point.

Beyond the modern mind's need to use its massive intellect is simply what is. The humdrum of eternity is moving beyond intellectual mammals addicted to thought. The space between a conscious world and a mind that is alone to bear witness.

It is the individual that, if still enough as a majestic night sky filled with stars billions of years away burning suspended above, communes with Divine Nature beyond the matrix programming. Where light enters the body and breath steadies is the human being, a spirit in a body, a speck in the fabric of the entirety of existence.

Edith Stein, a woman of Jewish faith turned Catholic Nun, felt that "Each finite creature can reflect only a fraction of the divine nature; thus, in the diversity of His creatures, God's infinity, unity and oneness appear to be broken into an effulgence of manifold rays.”

Proper awareness is beyond the false dichotomy of programmed reality of self and society and its many orchestrators. When the human eye breaks the shackles of opinion and, even more, breaks free from the cultural matrix manufactured before us, you are free.

You have read an excerpt of Nadeem Gibran Salaam's book The God Punk Revelations, which features "New York City moments of punk rock youth looming in the shadow of the Iraq War, which also marked the end of the CBGB era. This collection of essays from author Nadeem Gibran Salaam decant the reader into the very quicksilver times that are expressed in his realizations on consciousness, transcendentalism, and technology."

The God Punk Revelations is now available via Amazon both on Kindle and Print here.