Thursday, July 6, 2017
Censorship! – Where Would We Be Without It?
Censorship! – Where Would We Be Without It?
Composed on the 4th of July by Parisse Deza
...what we call reality is a culturally determined construct. And what we need is to accept at the deepest level possible that culture is the product of a long, cooperative, highly selective, highly developed and, last but not least, highly coercive process that culminates in agreement that shields us from other possibilities.
-Florinda Donner, anthropologist, Being-In-Dreaming
Censorship is the act of infringing on someone else’s freedom to express. It is the suppression of something considered objectionable.
We have, while in our egoic state, invented an unnatural set of restrictions, often referred to as rules, codes, regulations, laws, and morals, and artificially imposed them upon ourselves. We tell ourselves these things are for our own good, but we fail to examine, in fact we resist examining, how we feel when we force them on others and how we feel when they are forced upon ourselves, and, most importantly, we do not allow ourselves to experience the actual results of this behavior. We are too busy protecting ourselves from imagined harm to pay attention to reality (1).
There is a natural law about things, and that law, as applied by the founders of the United States and called American Common Law, has but one simple abrogation, one qualifying component which could limit someone’s freedom of expression: It is your right to say or do whatever you want, but cause no harm. “If there is no harm, there is no crime” is the foundational maxim of the true law of the land. As such, if you restrict someone’s freedom of movement or speech, you cause harm and commit a crime (2).
Censorship, our immediate topic, is the act of interfering with free expression where no harm is caused.
The reason this is important to us is that we have invented a prolific stream of “false harm” reasons to control each other’s free will, all of them stemming from the ego’s need to protect itself and to serve itself, and we have stubbornly clung to these lies because we are afraid to let go! If we are to move forward as a species, we have to divest these habits now.
Regarding speech, ‘false harm’ is the claim that something I say is or might be injurious to someone else, when in fact there is no real injury at all. A “bad word” doesn’t really injure anyone, except in their mind. No matter how small the incidence, the energy, the intention, and the result are the same: harm is caused because someone’s free will has been obstructed, and that is specifically what the United States was created to prevent. That is its essential purpose.
Psychologically, the act of claiming harm where there is none falls in the category of hallucinations induced by beliefs, like phobias and delusions. The person hearing a “bad” word is not actually harmed, they just pretend to be. Their belief system tells them to. The mind makes up a story about a word or an idea, pretends there is a threat, and convinces itself that that is justification for action against an innocent party just trying to express themself.
“Oh no!” cries the mighty ego, “I can’t hear that word! That word offends me!”
This would be really funny, if it weren’t such a tragedy for us, because it is just this kind of thinking that rules (pun intended) our lives in our present unnatural and truly dysfunctional society.
The answer to this is, of course, to become consciously functioning beings, like we used to be, a long, long time ago. The answer to the particular instance of an offending word or idea is to realize that: it’s not the word, it’s how it’s used. And to see this truth, we have to force ourselves.
When words are used as a release-valve maneuver to spew unresolved emotion they can lower our vibration. This is immature and bothersome. When words are used to attack, they can harm. Both situations need conscious attention in order to correct the energy flow so we maintain a healthy society. But to stifle in advance any possibility of these events happening is to deny humanity its right to learn thru experience and to grow. Rules do not permit growth, and that is why any legal system is a complete failure. It tries to operate outside of nature, which works thru loving attention, and causes even more harm.
But when words, even “bad” words, are used consciously and with good intention to describe an authentic experience needing to be expressed, a positive purpose is always served. This is because consciousness makes expression art-full, and art is the cultivation of the highest in ourselves. Art is what makes it possible for a person to take the most wretched feelings of murderous pain, sing them out loud thru the heart, and call it opera.
Here is an example of the proper use of words being met by rules and ending in more separation and unresolved pain...
On June 27th I posted a wonderful article on Rumor Mill News called Why Does America Not Have Free Health Care Yet?? (3). Near the end, I use the demonized “f” word, in participle form (-ing), as part of a literary device expressing my deep unsatisfaction and exasperation with America’s reluctance to take proper care of itself. Mechanically, the word was censored and replaced with a wimpy misrepresentation of itself, “F***ing”. This of course dilutes the emotional content and distorts the meaning, compromising the intention of the piece, and interfering directly with my own free will, for no purpose whatsoever but to blindly follow a rule.
Try as I may, I could not get the editors to see the point. Their mission was to protect sensitive readers from shock (“Warning – language!”). They completely marginalized all I had to say, dismissing every attempt to have a open conversation, shunting the dialogue back to the issue being one of rules, even guilt-tripping me, and trying to categorize the way I used the “f” word as “strong profanity”, “a swear” and a “curse”, none of which is accurate, and saying that RMN is the owner’s living room”, and that fact, not freedom, is the ultimate criterion for what gets published.
Well, blow me down.
I asked that my email be forwarded to the owner so I could have a conversation with her about it and express that the obvious and only good guideline in this question is to take each situation independently and consciously evaluate it. I am still waiting to hear from her.
Ascension With Mother Earth, Operation Disclosure, and Era Of Light, the other three very New Agey websites that published my article, never blinked a worried eye over my dangerous “f” word usage.
As I expressed earlier, the real problem with any small instance of censorship is that it is equal to any instance of infringement because the thinking and energetic are the same and they cause the same result. Stopping someone from harmlessly using an off-color word in an article is the same as a TSA agent confiscating your water bottle because it might blow up a plane or a police agent confiscating your automobile because it isn’t registered, and that makes you an enemy of the State. They are all infringements of free will.
So, where would we be without censorship?
We’d be the living demonstration of the original American vision, exercising conscious, responsible freedom, and we’d be happy.
Socrates brilliantly said: “The misuse of language instills evil in the soul.” If this is true, then the proper use of language is the working of good. Proper use means conscious use with good intent. Censorship is the misuse of language, and an ego issue worth admitting to and releasing for everyone’s good.
May we all soon be blessed with this insight.
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(1) The Egoic Mind, article by Eckhart Tolle: http://theworkbook.org/egoic.htm
(2) See my previous article, The Purpose Of The Union Of The States – What Are We The United States For?
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=72424 )
(3) http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=78125
Parisse Deza is a visionary in the field of consciousness and creativity. He is a counselor, teacher, Daoist internal alchemy, chigung, and feng-shui adept, and an artist in many traditional and non-traditional art forms. His main purpose is seeing-in the Aquarian Age and the fulfillment of the original American dream of personal freedom in relationship with all Life by focusing on radical truths. He lives in Sedona, Arizona.