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Title: Reclaim Your Mind : Manifesto Author: Anonymous Date: April 13, 2011 Language: en Topics: alienation, psychology, social control Source: Retrieved on June 7, 2012 from http://325.nostate.net/?p=2162 Notes: Dark Matter Publications
We are pleased to publish this anonymous text which appeared on the old
website of the 325 Collective in 2003 and which was re-edited and
published online in 2011. We donât agree with this text entirely and are
pessimistic about the prospect of a wide-spread âhealingâ of Earth or
the masses of society â as has always been the case, minorities will
throw off the chains of social obligations, will seize their own life
trajectory and wilfully define themselves, finding each other and
creating unique moments of beauty, life and freedom. Maybe in the ruins
of techno-industrial mass society a widespread healing will occur. For
the time being, we aim to liberate ourselves from the cage weâve been
born into, alongside as many others as possible. This means overcoming
the limiting constraints of our mental patterns and freeing ourselves
from the self-fulfilling diagnoses of mental illness, to glory in our
inscrutable uniqueness and our dysfunctionality â our refusal to be
working, integrated components of the megamachine.
The zine âBeyond Amnestyâ (downloadable from 325.nostate.net) is also
well worth reading, a piercing and personal attack on psychiatry and
this prison society that drives us to self-destruction.
Anti-civilisation thinkers such as Chellis Glendinning, John Zerzan and
Derrick Jensen have traced the pathology of modern society to its root
in domestication, and the growing patterns of control, repression, abuse
and self-destruction. It will take the deliberate violation of the
control patterns instilled by the tranquilising institutions of society
to reclaim our wilful self-empowered autonomy.
We remember the suicides and drug abuse and say the deaths are murders
by this dominator system. We are in an existential struggle and have
declared revolutionary war to the end.
Dark Matter Publications, Spring 2012
It is well known that depression has been on a steady rise in the past
few decades. This increase apparently isnât about to stop since the
World Health Organization (WHO) recently predicted that, by 2020,
depression would be the second most prevalent health problem in the
world, just below heart disease, and offered as an explanation that this
was due to a previous underestimation of the number of people suffering
from this âillnessâ.
Couldnât the increasing feeling of emptiness and worthlessness
characteristic of depression be related to the society we live in, at a
time when people lose themselves in consumption and mass entertainment
to avoid thinking about their miserable life, their economic survival or
the ongoing destruction of the planet? While the âexpertsâ paid by
pharmacology corporations will invariably answer that depression is a
brain disorder due to a âchemical imbalanceâ, the result of some faulty
genes they have yet to identity, we cannot help to wonder how this could
not be environmental considering there was no such thing as depression
in Africa before colonization?
Depression has widely been touted as endemic to the 20-something
generation. Severe depression is 10 times more prevalent today than it
was 50 years ago, and it strikes a full decade earlier in life on
average than it did a generation ago. Such feelings and behaviours
testify to frustration and despair that have nowhere to go when the
social landscape is so frozen. Disaffection or even opposition are
quickly marketed into sellable style images; alienation as fashion.
Meanwhile suicide, perhaps the ultimate regression, has been on a steady
rise for several decades.
- John Zerzan
At best depression is considered as a necessary side-effect of
âprogressâ â just like civilian murders are a âcollateral damageâ of war
â but âexpertsâ always affirm that more scientific research is the only
solution to the problem. Until these mythical genes have been found and
we can all live in the promised techno-virtual âparadiseâ as
genetically-modified human beings, the pharmacology industry is of
course delighted to sell drugs to help humanity deal with its âchemical
imbalancesâ, just like we are sold bottled water to âsolveâ the problem
of water pollution.
Unfortunately if they discover a perfect drug to remove all the symptoms
of depression and stress, they wonât stop here. As it is becoming
increasingly clear, their interest is not happiness and well-being of
the whole of humanity, as they promise, but âprogressâ and the on-going
technological race. Such a drug would in reality be an opportunity to
increase the demands of society and the stress- and depression-inducing
effects of our environment. Our dependency on drugs will force in turn
others to use them to be able to compete and survive.
Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them
terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their
unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in
our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people
depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect,
antidepressants are a means of modifying an individualâs internal state
in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he
would otherwise find intolerable.
- Theodore Kaczynski
While until recently society had to adapt to the limits of human beings,
the situation has been reversed and itâs now human beings who have to
adapt to society. Is that their idea of a âperfect worldâ? And more
importantly, is that yours?
Since this essential question never generates any debate in mainstream
media, it seems that pharmacology corporations have already answered for
us. Using the false promises of consumerism â âour product will solve
all your problems and make you feel fulfilled just like these idealized
images you see on our adsâ â the sales of anti-depressants has increased
by 800% in the 90â˛s alone. They now claim that one american out of five,
a market of over 50 millions people, âneeds a cure urgentlyâ. Is it
urgent because people are finally waking up and they need to be plugged
back into the Matrix of illusion before they see the desert of the real
world they live in?
One effect of the excessive marketing from the pharmacology industry,
and the many other industries promoting âhealthâ as a value, is the
creation of an unique ideal that everyone is supposed to cling to. These
âfullfilledâ consumers we see on ads have become, consciously or
unconsciously, some kind of role models for most of us. They make us
believe that permanent happiness is possible, the biggest myth of them
all.
Suffering is a misunderstanding. It exists. Itâs real. I can call it a
misunderstanding, but I canât pretend that it doesnât exist, or will
ever cease to exist⌠There are times I â I am very frightened. Any
happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isnât all a
misunderstanding â this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain⌠If
instead of fearing it and running from it, one could get through it, go
beyond it. I donât know how to say it. But I believe that the reality of
pain is not pain. If you can endure it all the way.
- Ursula Le Guin
Human beings, like any conscious organisms, are dualistic by nature. We
canât know the sweet without knowing the sour. We canât experience
happiness without experiencing sadness. With our attempt to eliminate
sadness, with our obsession for positivism, we have only found emotional
death. This is the way someone suffering from depression feels. In fact,
it could be argued that a depressive person is different from a ânormalâ
person only in her awareness of the poverty of her emotional life. Too
afraid of terror, we have become unable to feel joy. To be able to go
beyond that, pain should be embraced like any other feelings.
Chagrin, shame, fear, terror, anger are transient madness.
- Benjamin Rush, father of American psychiatry
Individuals labelled with manic-depression (bipolar disorder), on the
other hand, experience both states intensely. While mania is accepted
and even promoted by our society (think about shopping sprees), the
depressive episodes are frowned upon. Take a minute and ask yourself: is
this intensity necessarily bad for the person or is it a problem only
because it doesnât fit in the myth of permanent happiness promoted by
modern society? Yes, manic-depression cause suffering and makes it
difficult to live a ânormalâ life, but isnât it also a way to experience
life more deeply?
What we observe is that, while some problems such as depression and
stress seem to be the result of our decadent mental landscape, other
states of mind have become a problem only because they donât fit within
the grand schemes of civilization, where normality makes it easier to
enforce âorderâ. They use cultural differences for marketing purpose but
in the end everyone is supposed to buy the same products and have the
same desires: a stable income, an happy family, a nice house, a
perfectly-sized body, a great confidence. Those who can afford it have
âchoicesâ, but they are mostly limited to different tastes, such as the
color of their car.
Yet diversity is essential for the survival of any eco-system. If nature
has survived until our âconquestâ, itâs because of this biological
diversity. If the climate or environment changed, some species would die
but others would survive, making it possible for evolution to continue.
When civilization will have reduced cows to one âperfectâ race, it will
only require one virus to kill them all.
What interests us most though is diversity amongst human beings. We see
that society doesnât support this simply by the way public schools work:
all children have to follow the same subjects, regardless of their
interests, and even if at the end of compulsory school they can âchooseâ
between different careers, this is because of the needs of the job
marketplace only. As a result a lot of teenagers finish school alienated
from their initial aspirations and struggle to find a job which
interests them.
Letâs now look at some other widespread âmental illnessesâ from the
point of view that they are more a difference, part of the diversity of
any ecosystem, than a disorder:
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a particularly sad
example of the world we live in: many children are unable to stay all
day long in these prisons called âschoolsâ because they have too much
energy and creativity. âConcernedâ about their future in this society,
influenced by psychiatrists, their parents feed them with Ritalin,
sometimes since the age of 4, to numb them down and kill their flame.
They fit again in the illusion of normality, but does that makes them
happier? Schizophrenia is often mentioned when talking about mental
illnesses for it can be deeply disturbing and very long. To understand
this âillnessâ we should take a look at âprimitiveâ cultures: in all of
them, we can find shamans who had the gift to travel on the âother
worldâ and heal people. The initiation was involuntary (although young
shamans could be identified early by their tribes) and required several
deeply disturbing years until the shaman was able to master his or her
skills. Whatâs interesting is that the effects of this initiation are
extremely similar to the âsymptomsâ of schizophrenia. Indeed some
primitive tribes were fooled by western psychiatrists that their future
shaman was âschizophrenicâ and had to be medicated. Unfortunately it
appears that anti-psychotic drugs prevent the process to be finished, in
such a way that the individual gets lost in the void between the two
worlds.
People are increasingly put under the label of Aspergerâs syndrome or
highly-functioning autism. Individuals diagnosed with this âdisorderâ
usually have a high IQ and no impairment other than a difficulty to
interact and communicate with others. We suggest that their isolation
and obsessive thinking may set them apart and make communication more
difficult (or less meaningful) as they are not on the same wavelength as
others. That doesnât have to be a disadvantage though: some
psychiatrists have in fact recently âback-diagnosedâ Newton and Einstein
with Aspergerâs syndrome. The question is: would these two geniuses have
delivered their wisdom if they had been labelled as autistic and
medicated in their youth?
Social anxiety is also on the rise. Apart from the fact itâs easy to
become self-conscious about our behavior and look when we live in a
society which judge everyone on their appearance, itâs worth mentionning
that amongst all animals a percentage of them are naturally shy. Shy
animals have greater chances of survival since their fears put them less
at risk. For human beings, shyness may make it more difficult to be part
of society but itâs also a great opportunity to develop inner
capabilities that others, too busy socializing, donât have the time to
care about.
What we observe is that most of the pain felt by âmentally illâ
individuals is caused more by a rejection of society than by the
âillnessâ itself. Alienation, loneliness, homelessness, low self-esteem
are all the destructive results of a society which doesnât tolerate
differences. Furthmore, the belief that there is something âwrongâ that
has to be âcorrectedâ (or at least repressed) can only alienate people
from themselves and make them feel miserable and worthless. Indeed
almost all of these âillnessesâ are usually coupled with depression.
Our society tends to regard as a âsicknessâ any mode of thought or
behavior that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible
because when an individual doesnât fit into the system it causes pain to
the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation
of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a âcureâ for a
âsicknessâ and therefore as good.
- Theodore Kaczynski
All this makes us wonder if psychiatrists and psychologists are really
interested in healing or if their role is to keep the illusion of
âorderâ, ânormalityâ and âsanityâ within society? Indeed the primary
goals of asylums has always been to keep the âinsanesâ outside of
society because they were considered âdangerousâ. But how are they
dangerous considering that there is statistically the same amount of
criminals amongst the âsanesâ than amongst the âinsanesâ? Is it perhaps
because they do not fit in society and their mere existence exposes the
lies of this system?
Itâs interesting to note that, before the appearance of asylums,
heretics, witches, prostitutes, madmen and basically anyone âsocially
deviantâ were being âtreatedâ (tortured, exorcised, burnt) by the
Inquisition and, when the Church started to lose its power, some of the
witch-hunters âconvertedâ to psychiatry and kept on doing basically the
same job, using pseudoscience instead of religion to put themselves
above the possessed/mentally ill and try to adjust them to societyâs
standards. These standards change enormously through time and space. For
example, homosexuality was considered to be a disorder by the bible of
psychiatry, the DSM, until the 70â˛s.
Curiously, many psychiatrists today believe that witches were
âmisdiagnosedâ, that they were in fact âsufferingâ of âmental illnessâ,
not âdemonic possessionâ. They are the only ones who donât believe in
the theory of the scapegoat (a figure whom the fears â or repressed
desires â of society are projected on), agreed by all historians. Could
it be because this theory also applies perfectly for the âmentally illsâ
of today?
The ones suffering the most from psychiatry are perhaps the children,
who do not have choices regarding their medication because they are not
supposed to be âresponsibleâ enough. Apart from ADHD and Aspergerâs
syndrome mentionned previously, the label of âOppositional Defiant
Disorderâ offers a convenient explanation for parents who do not want to
understand why their children are rebelling against their oppressive
ideology and pointless consumer lifestyle. For these parents, medication
appears to be the only âsolutionâ, especially if they are themselves
victims of the psychiatric industry.
More striking cases of how the myth of âmental illnessâ has been used by
the system for repression include the Soviet Union where political
dissenters were regularly âdiagnosedâ as âmentally illâ and confined in
asylums. Similar repression was done in the USA where socially deviants
were locked â such as Timothy Leary for advocating the use of âillegalâ
drugs. And as recently as April 2003 someone who was reading and talking
about conspiracy theories within the US government was diagnosed as
âparanoidâ and held in an asylum for 9 days!
The excess of the passion for liberty produced, in many people, opinions
and conducts which could not be removed by reason not retrained by
government⌠The extensive influence which these opinions had upon the
understandings, passions, and morals of many of the citizens of the
United States, constituted a form of insanity, which I shall take the
liberty of distinguishing by the name of anarchy.
- Benjamin Rush, father of American psychiatry
Just like new laws are constantly added to create new classes of
criminals and force people into an ever-narrowing range of legality, new
mental disorders are âdiscoveredâ all the time to create new classes of
âinsanesâ, open new markets for the pharmacology industry and force
people into an ever-narrowing range of âsanityâ. Actually, the
âsymptomsâ of mental disorders â the only things on which the existence
of these âdisordersâ are based on â are so broad and common that anyone
could be âdiagnosedâ with 2â3 of them by just visiting a psychiatrist!
We need a program of psychosurgery and political control of our society.
The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from
the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think
that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only
his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does
not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal
orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain.
Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electrical
stimulation of the brain.
- Dr. Jose Delgado
This quote, coming from a psychiatrist who was recruited by the CIA for
the MKULTRA program of mind control after having served the fascist
regime in Spain, could not be more explicit. This obsession for control
is nothing new for the male-driven civilization we live in, and
controlling the human mind is no doubt their biggest challenge. They
dream to kill the animal (the life-force) in us, to finally transform us
into perfect machines working exclusively in the name of âprogressâ. The
founding father of American psychiatry, Benjamin Rush, even considered
insanes as âuntamed animals whom it is the psychiatristâs duty to
disciplineâ, a comparison which remind us of the way non-white people
were treated during the colonization.
Electroshock âtherapyâ and lobotomy are not as common as a few decades
ago, although the fact these barbaric practices still exist is deeply
revealing of the society we live in. Forced medication has been mostly
replacing them, often with a threat of forced confinment if the drugs
are not taken.
This change is not caused by a new sense of humanity amongst
psychiatrists but by pressures from insurance companies who find it
cheaper to send patients back home with drugs prescriptions, as well as
from the needs of the pharmacology industry to increase its revenues.
Another cause is that people are generally more willing to get âfixedâ
but we shouldnât necessarily see voluntary treatment as a progress over
forced one. Indeed, it may just prove that we have been so effectively
brainwashed that we do not resist anymore.
Of all the tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive.
- C. S. Lewis
Letâs have a look at the way these prescription drugs âworkâ. While ads
and psychiatrists explicitly or implicitly claim that they help to heal,
the reality appears different: they work by merely hiding the âsymptomsâ
and keeping the brain quiet. Once the drugs have finished their effects,
the individual is on the same situation as before or even worse, since
all antipsychotic drugs can damage the brain after several months or
years of âtreatmentâ, a phenomenon known as tardive dyskinesia. All of
them are strongly addictive as well.
So we see that drugs do nothing other than keeping an artificial state
in the brain which makes things more bearable for the individual. There
is nothing wrong with that, considering that some mental disorders are
deeply disturbing and can push to suicide, but itâs not fair to tell
people that their medication is going to heal them. Prescription drugs,
like any other drugs, should be used as cautiously as possible and along
with a real treatment, assisted or not by a professional. Otherwise the
person will stay a consumer/victim of the pharmacology industry all her
life. Sadly, this may be what they are hoping for.
The most problematic effect of these drugs, however, is that they often
prevent individuals to go through the natural healing process which
requires a dynamic chaotic void before a healthy restoration is
possible. Real healing is not a slow gradual process, as psychiatrists
would like to believe, but is cyclic, with its lows and its highs, until
the brain has been âpurgedâ from old conditioned neurons and a new
freedom can be found. Unfortunately the people working on the mental
health field donât like anything chaotic so they do all they can to
suppress these âsymptomsâ, preventing at the same time patients to reach
the end of the tunnel.
If a person is lucky enough to be âallowedâ to complete the healing
process, it results in a new outlook on her image, life, reality and
society, allowing her to adopt a more healthy lifestyle, perhaps away
from mindless consumerism and weapons of mass distraction like
television. Challenges and difficulties are necessary elements of any
spiritual growth, and what could be more challenging than a mental
âillnessâ which forces us to understand how our brain works and to
evolve our consciousness in order to be able to keep on living? Our
âdisordersâ truly are dangerous gifts which should be cultivated and
respected rather than repressed and hated.
Make no mistake: this lengthy analysis on civilization and psychiatry is
not used to push off our responsibility, to blame all our problems on
others. We are all too eager to finally reclaim our minds! We donât need
âprofessionalsâ to tell us how to live, people have found this by
themselves for millions of years, and those âexpertsâ prevent people
thinking for themselves, providing instead ready-made explanations for
any difficulty they may encounter in their development.
Either you think â or else others have to think for you and take power
from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and
sterilize you.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Victimism leads people to feel that they must have some kind of
professional to help them â mental health agent, religious leader,
educator, fashion adviser â because they are incapable of independently
making their own decisions or carrying out their own activities. This is
not the case! We are all capable of finding our way to healing, itâs
only the belief that we are not which makes us stuck!
Who can know better than ourselves whatâs going on in our minds? Our
deep fears, motivations, desires are usually beyond words and they reach
such a deep layer of our reality that few psychiatrist could find about
them, especially not under the pressure of insurance companies to be
more âefficientâ. The way we think and see the world is entirely
dependent on our past experiences. No one can truly understand us
without re-experiencing our whole life!
The idea is not necessarily to reject psychiatry as a whole but to let
people choose what they feel is best for them, by showing them the
different alternatives available and educating them about the lies of
the mental health industry. Most importantly, we are not looking for an
unique âTruthâ, we want each individual to understand how their mind
works, seek their own solutions and have the freedom to enact whatever
course of action they feel is best. Self-exploration allows any of us to
evolve from the status of helpless victims to the one of healers. This
is the spirit of do-it-yourself applied to the brain!
Alternatives to traditional âtreatmentsâ exist and most have existed
long before a professional class of psychiatrists was created. Examples
are : Meditation, yoga, magick, self-hypnosis, herbal & nutritional
treatment, cognitive therapy, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). All
are useful pieces in our toolboxes. Most of them also have a holistic
point of view, which emphasizes the importance of the whole and the
interdependence of the parts, an idea most psychiatrists completely
reject!
The solution will not come from above or outside, but from below and
within. Our unconscious wants to help our conscious mind to heal, if
only we listen to it. Changes inevitably happen when we finally take
responsibility for who we are, for our life, for our community, for our
planet, for our future. We arenât fooled anymore by societyâs doubletalk
which tells us to be âresponsible citizensâ while asking us to follow
orders from above without questioning. We want real responsibility and
real freedom!
At this point something should be clarified: this is not just about
healing, because this idea would suppose there is a plateau to be
reached, a sense of eternal well-being to be found. There isnât any,
except on fairy tales and advertisements. Remember: permanent happiness
is their myth! Personal development (or whatever name you prefer to give
it) is in fact an on-going cyclic process where the travel matters more
than the destination.
To be able to travel more freely, youâll want to unload from your
shoulders all the burden of psychiatric conditioning and especially the
idea that there is something wrong with you. As it should be said more
often: you are perfect as you are! You have done your best given your
situation and, even if the path you took until now has been more
difficult than others, this doesnât mean youâre a failure! âNormalâ
people will have to go through this one day too, or else they will never
have the chance to grow up.
You are what you believe you are. If you insist on believing that you
are a helpless victim of a terrible illness whose salvation lies on the
hands of a few mega-corporations, this is what youâll eventually
experience all your life. What do you want?
They lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of
your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of
disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored
you with civilization & all its usurious emotions. There is no becoming,
no revolution, no struggle, no path; already youâre the monarch of your
own skin â your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the
love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of
sky.
- Hakim Bey
Depending on how many years have been spent on the mental health
industry (or under the judgment of society), changing this belief can be
difficult but itâs possible! Pay attentions to your beliefs in your
day-by-day life, play with different paradigms (belief-systems) for a
day, for a week, for a month. Hack into your reality-tunnel and accept
the idea that you are not inferior but simply different, that we are in
fact all different. If you need some inspiration or if you arenât quite
convinced that beliefs have a role to play, read some books on cognitive
liberty, neuro-linguistic programming or chaos. It might forever change
the way you view ârealityâ.
Our mind is self-created, it has developed over the years as we were
bouncing on ârealityâ and other human beings. There is no rigid
structure that every brain follows, even if some models are useful to
understand how we think. As a consequence, we all have completely
different potentials and shortcomings. Instead of focusing on our
âproblemsâ, wouldnât it be more sensible to promote our gifts, skills,
desires, sensitivities, so that each one of us make the most of their
potential during their limited lifetime, no matter how different they
are from the current ânormsâ?
The norms are and have always been illusory anyway. Quantum physics tell
us we are the co-creators of the universe, that the only fact of
observing an object changes its nature and that our âsubjectiveâ mind
has a much more important role in reality than most materialists think.
The way we see ârealityâ and ourselves has more to do with our mental
environment (âthe Matrixâ) than with any kind of materialist reality or
genetic predispositions. If we are able to somehow go beyond the mental
structures of civilization, if we are able to transcend them, then
everything becomes possible!
Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea
of his limitations is based on experience of the past, and every step in
his progress extends his empire. There is therefore no reason to assign
theoretical limits to what he may be, or what he may do.
- Aleister Crowley
To follow our path, we must first know what we want. We must learn to
listen to our inner voice, our unconscious, our true will, that
something inside of each one of us which intuitively know whatâs the
best direction to take. This may mean turning off, at least for a while,
all the background noise of civilization, like television, radio,
newspapers and eventually friends. All our conditioned fears, desires
and ideas of our limitations will not go away at the second we isolate
ourselves but we may find meditation valuable to help us in this
process.
Two roads diverged in the woods. I took the one less travelled by, and
that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost
As far as we know, we only have one life on this planet. Why should we
waste it trying to adapt ourselves to the always more demanding
expectations of this insane society when there is so much to live,
explore, experience and discover?
Changes always come from below and the old structures of oppression will
inexorably fall when we stop relying on them. We will then finally be
able to create a new culture of diversity and solidarity where everyone
is accepted (and loved!) for who they are!
The good news is that any change we make in society through our actions
is likely to have much more impact on our lives than any treatment done
alone at home! This doesnât mean we have to create a new class of
professionals who will tell others how to live, thatâs the very thing we
are opposing! Just like the position of a teacher over his students
automatically prevents any teaching to occur, the authority of a healer
rules out any real healing. Effective healing is non-hierarchical, with
all individuals healing and being healed at the same time.
We have been staying alone for too long! After too many years of
isolation and alienation, some have given up the hope that someone will
one day truly understand them (as opposed to just being âcompassionateâ
like their psychiatrist â if they are lucky). Enough despair, enough
division! We are here, the âinsaneâ, the âangryâ, âthe unstableâ, the
âchaoticâ, the âdepressedâ âŚ
The saying ânone of us is free as long as some are not freeâ seems more
true than ever in these oppressive times. We canât expect to find joy
and wholeness without changing our environment, without changing the
very structures of reality. Thus any real, profound healing will
necessarily involve a healing of the planet and society as a whole.