Handcuffs

[LMNO]

What holds us back?

Spiders.

What holds us back?

The Machine™.

What holds us back?

Authority.

What holds us back?

The Black Iron Prison.

What holds us back?

OURSELVES.

In the end, it all boils down to this.  At least for anyone reading this.  For the most part, we didn't ask for these restraints.  They were given to us; we were tricked; we never noticed they were there.  Before we could make rational decisions, they were placed on our shoulders, wrapped around our ankles, diffused into our brains.  They're even part of the hardware.  And, in the course of our days, we don't see them, or feel them.  Like the suckers in Harrison Bergeron, we find ourselves weighted down, and masked.  Distractions are enforced, and vision is dimmed.  But we don't realize it.  We've grown used to the weight.

What we sometimes refer to as transcendence can simply be the recognition that we've handicapped ourselves without really thinking about what we've done, or what we've had done to us.  To let go of these blinders is not a freedom from this world, it's freedom into the world.  But this isn't some simple Bartleby the Scrivner tale, proposing that freedom is a rejection of existence.  This isn't about Making Choices, nor is it a sociopathic narcissism of acting only in your personal self interest.

This is about why you have the thoughts you have, why you act the way you do.  Who gave them to you?  How much of your personality is actually from inside yourself, and how much accreted onto your soul from years of wading hip deep through the muck of the world?  How many of your thoughts have been twisted and warped after travelling through the biology of your brain, which was clearly not designed to handle rational thought very well?  I <3 Huckabees asks, "How can I not be myself?", and here's your answer:  By letting your history and your body overwhelm your mind. 

So, our first steps are to recognize what our various manacles look like, how the locking mechanism works, and how to pick the lock.  The intention of this thread is to figure that shit out.  In detail.

[LMNO]

Ouch.  That one hurt coming out.  It's been a while. 

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Excellent lmno- im going to ponder this and get back to it tomorrow. I wont be back on my laptop until late.

[Luna]

Ooh, good...

This is something I've been working on in myself since things went to shit last year.  I thought of it as rediscovering the pieces that were carved off in order to fit elsewhere, but...  new angle, good.

[Slurrealist]

Emotions and emotional imprints are the strongest manacles IMO. Especially emotions such as fear, anger, guilt, and else...
When you are in fear, you are either paralyzed, and can do nothing to improve the situation, or hyperactive, which also influences the ability to think straight.
Anger is just a waste of energy, both physical and mental, and it drives to strokes.
Guilt is like a heavy stone that drags away dreams and life energy.
And, IMO, people are sitting in front of the cage's entrance - and it's open; maybe there aren't any walls at all - but because of fear people don't see it that they're free, and always were.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm going to need to re-read this one a few times I think.

[Slurrealist]

It's like the parable about the elephant from the BIP, in some way.
There's always a choice; you can always choose which way to go; no one is stopping you from doing the thing that you like. Your own self is the last obstacle. The attachment to previous negative experiences stops the growth process.
To put it more simple, the negative events are bricks in the wall. Slowly, they create a wall that stops from seeing the beauty of the world. If you stop perceiving them as something negative, and let them free, the wall will fall.
Also, IMO, people stop learning or thinking about new ideas when someone says to them that it's absolute crap. The guilt trip becomes activated, the person will stop checking new ideologies/views/ideas in fear of being humiliated, ridiculed again, and with time the imprint blocks all learning at all. If this block is removed, people will be more tolerant and open to new ideas IMO.
These are just my thoughts.

[The Johnny]

... Life is not an argument; between the conditions for life, error could be one of them.

The want for truth could hide a want for death...

The falseness of a judgement is not for us now an objection against it; maybe it is in this that our new language might sound most strange. The issue is to know up to which point this judgement favours life, preserves life, preserves the species, even maybe selects the speices... Admitting that non-truth is a condition for life: this means of course, facing dengerously the usual sentiments of value...

I consider that the amount of "truth" we see, is directly correlated to the amount of "horror" we can withstand without falling apart... religion is a self-delusion, but it is such an important part of human culture because it gives humans hope and deals with the short-comings of reality...

Freud spoke about angst, symptom and repression in the sense that repression is a response to angst, burying deeply into our unconscoius what troubles us so we dont become a wreck of nerves.

So deluding ourselves with bullshit is a defense mechanism, sometimes needed for our survival, be it on an individual or collective scale.

[Pæs]

Here follows the imperfect expression of my feelings regarding our restraints. I recognise that I make points both for and against the Black Iron Prison metaphor, without resolving that conflict. I'm hoping there are ideas in here which others can work with and respond to which might aid my continuing with whatever inspired this. I'm sharing a space with a very loud television at present, so it's hard to form coherent thought on the topic, let alone translate it into text.

"You're locked in a prison", "restrained", "handcuffed", "you've carried this weight your whole life", "entangled in a web".

These are powerful images.

Emergency. Emergency. Initiate lockdown procedures.

The mind seizes up, reserving all of its processing power for survival-related functions. The Fear begins to creep into cracks in the mind. Into hollows which are vestigial remnants of a primitive intolerance to being trapped. We induce fight or flight when we frame the situation in this way. These images are more powerful because of their appeal to the animal within us... but neither fight not flight are useful ways of responding to The Prison.

The animal who chooses to fight wants to thrash around and tear it all down. The Discordian Abolitionist rebels against his self-imposed slavery.

"I will not be oppressed by mere concepts, by names, by categories, by biology. I refuse to play servant to societal expectations that I had no place in setting."

What does he want?

"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong."

Thus, he would tear down the walls in pursuit of freedom... but this freedom from The Prison is nihilism.

In portraying this as a prison, as restrictive and limiting, I fear we give some control over our reaction to it to our primitive mind.
The walls are not an obstacle to be removed from our path. They are experience, not just ours but that of our ancestors, who found that unconsciously learning and integrating the behaviour and beliefs of others was beneficial. Who didn't need to consciously understand this, but learned it by doing it and surviving where those without the predisposition towards recognising The Machine failed to continue their legacy.

The events that developed these walls are restricting us in the same way that all of the past is restricting us. From infinite possibilities they have selected one reality to be the current state of affairs and given us this to build upon. The Black Iron Prison isn't the enemy. What we need to attack is our ignorance of its topography.

Our biases: the tendency to force facts into narratives, reducing information for processing and disregarding the existence of lost data, consideration of information irrelevant to the subject at hand (previous belief, consideration of social influence, desirability of particular results), are not entirely without their merits. It might be foolish to exorcise these completely, but they need to recognised as tools for swift processing of information, rather than the default.

It takes a special kind of person to want to turn against these, or even examine then in any depth. We Truth Seekers are made of different stuff. This can only mean that the Truth Seeker, he who is inclined to attempt a jail break, has the good fortune of being locked in a cell which encourages his escape.

What are we doing with our knowledge of these things, outside of our own personal intellectual evolution, if the only ones who can "wake up" are those who are very light sleepers?
Maybe we're just looking for company. I do not think we can say that we seek to enlighten anyone or change the world.

Nobody gave me my thoughts. I took them from everyone I ever encountered, as I took this understanding.
Sometimes I take the blinders off, and open myself to every possibility and other times I put them on so I can focus only on the road ahead.

[Scribbly]

This was an incredible read; the OP and the responses. It is going to take me a little while to come back with a response worth reading, but I wanted to let you know that it was awesome.

[LMNO]

It takes a special kind of person to want to turn against these, or even examine then in any depth. We Truth Seekers are made of different stuff. This can only mean that the Truth Seeker, he who is inclined to attempt a jail break, has the good fortune of being locked in a cell which encourages his escape.

I quite like the recursive nature of this thought. More later.

[Placid Dingo]

Meow, read Cain's Discordianism as Perfect Nihilism. It does some way towards addressing some of your ideas.

[Pæs]

Meow, read Cain's Discordianism as Perfect Nihilism. It does some way towards addressing some of your ideas.

I think I read that when it was first posted... but it's a good idea to take another look at it with this in mind, cheers.

[Pæs]

Meow, read Cain's Discordianism as Perfect Nihilism. It does some way towards addressing some of your ideas.

I read Cain's piece again. I don't see which parts of my post it relates to, apart from their both discussing nihilism.
I only meant to mention it as a dismissal of the attitude that some take where freedom has to be total liberation from all structural abstractions.
If I'm missing another connection, please tell me what it is.

That said, it was a good time to reread Discordianism as Perfect Nihilism, to get me thinking about that again.

Edited for clarity.

[Placid Dingo]

The way I saw it is this:

You tear away at the facade and are disturbed. What's behind the curtain? Nothing. What does my life mean? Nothing. Where are we going? Nowhere. Nothing, nowhere nothing.

We realize the reality tunnels, frames, beliefs all give us meaning, but they also entrap us in their form. We are in a black iron prison formed by these elements, but when we dismantle them we are left staring at the void directly behind them. Nihilism.

To me, the way I read Cain's piece was that Discordia is perfect nihilism because it has the postmodern advantage of recognizing reality as partly a construction of reality tunnels, frames and ideologies. It accepts the horrible truths but adds new, useful, sometime beautiful truths. It's a a way of understanding the way things are, without embracing the void. You can make yor reality tunnel in front of the void, and when it doesn't meet your needs you replace it with another, or tack on a second, contradictory tunnel.

To me this helped to explain how to accept the inherent lack of meaning in many things without falling directly into nihilism.