The mind is territory and it can be owned.
At least in today's world it can through copyright and the force of law.
The mass perception is programmed through repetition. To control the mediums that repeat the data into the mass perception is to own the vehicle that can edit the mind and its collective base programming.
Traditional music was once a way to preserve culture. Through songs that no one could really own but were owned by everyone within that culture, customs carried on, and people then repeated these songs onto the next generation.
When a new song is born and it catches as a song worth repeating, then it is repeated and it also becomes part of the cultural repertoire.
Modern popular music is no different, however with controlled media seemingly meaningless songs find a seat into core conditioning of the collective mind the same way traditional/folk music once did.
Controlled media in this sense is the ability to market a symbol through repetition in popular public mediums; which is dependent on ownership of that medium, the amount of money in one's pocket to push that symbol divided by the present value of that symbol in the group mind.
The controllers of the media in effect have control of the ability to imprint new group conditioning through repetition.
Look at Coca Cola for example. A useless product that has no nutritional value (it actually causes disease) that has become an international cultural icon and it is accepted without question to have huge banners at all major events, whether it be music, sport or charity; and plastered onto every spare space it can smear its marketing faeces onto in every major town and city. One of the latest advertisements which I have seen plastered in Thessaloniki in Greece, Perth in Australia and Copenhagen features both a male and a female motioning toward to an upright bottle with their mouths open indicating a possible commencement of fellatio.
Modern popular music in the modern age has become the same thing. Seemingly useless crap that holds no substance, yet is deemed valuable because of the manipulation of the rules of the group mind through the media - dependent on a public that remains unaware of their nature and their tendency to behave as a group; all the while the public being conditioned from birth with the belief they are individuals who are making individual decisions living in a 'free' society.
So the group mind is like a country divided in territory by corporations, products, governments, religions, belief systems and culture.
Copyright of a song like, Hotel California is an interesting place to start with exploring this phenomenon.
By all rights it holds the cultural heritage of an era and is deemed an 'iconic' song in which the group mind collectively 'owns'.
It is a modern traditional song. Programmed into the group perception by mass repetition under favourable circumstances all thanks to marketing geniuses of the era.
But, here's the catch, it is 'owned' by the corporation. The corporation enforces its 'ownership' using the force of physical laws in a country. Through our conditioning into the system or 'rights' and our collective tacit consent to this system it effectively 'owns' a piece of something that is collectively owned. That is, it owns a guaranteed trigger or switch in consciousness that, should anyone want to or try to use it (this collectively owned traditional song) must pay the corporation per use with money = physical labour (well, for the majority of us not born with it, or not having the skills to swindle it through 'smart business'). So for something that cannot be inherently owned, through the invisible fences put in our minds in this 'free' society, it IS 'owned'.
And by no means am I suggesting you go out immediately and copy everyone's work and then try and sell it as yours. There is a place to give credit where it is due, it helps us collectively to gain a system of reference points by which to gain a constantly perfecting picture of reality.
Ownership of the mind is corporate slavery. To understand how the group mind works and how our individual minds are affected by the group mind on an unconscious level is a good place to start research to become self-aware. Pick up a text book on group psychology and if you are like any normal person, you should be shocked at what you're reading. The level of sentience or conscious decision making actually present in a public that believes they are all sentient is possibly below 1 percent of the population.
Copyright, although sounding great to assist everyone in protecting their work, is only in effect able to protect those that have the money to take those to court that have done the wrong thing.
So while, in the modern society of the hipster, the 'individual' is bandied about as some kind of modern cultural saviour, we actually live under a very intense kind of invisible mental slavery where entire swathes of group mind territory has been claimed by corporations who are willing to police their territory with the long arm of the law.
Consider what kind of laws are to be passed by corporations that own such music through international trade agreements only answerable to international courts run by the corporations themselves. The TPP (Trans-Pacific-Partnership) in Australia for example.
If the strict copyright laws that are in these agreements are passed, 'Hotel California' (a modern traditional music - a piece of mind territory - a conditioned trigger in the collective bag of tricks) won't even be allowed to be played on the street by a busker.
It's not just music that we should be aware of, it's anything cultural and that is anything that is in our group perception that we relate to as a group. As soon as something becomes popular enough, it is owned by the group. The 'creator' acted as the group to seed the idea and can not use it to pump up their ego any longer than the introductory period.
But everybody wants to be god you see. Everyone plays a game of power, wanting to have some kind of eternal life through imprinting their personality through a creation or discovery into the group mind. The desire to never be forgotten. The desire for power.
What we all share and use on a daily basis cannot be owned. It's a fundamental flaw in the present system. But I do believe it is not a mistake either.
Free the mind with self-awareness. Free your own mind first, understand what parts of your mind is the group mind, then assist others in finding the same. With enough people on board, real freedom will become part of our collective bag of tricks and this kind of invisible chains can never hold anyone ever again.
If a desire for power caused this mess, shouldn't appeasing our need to control others alleviate it? In this discovering the personal insecurities that caused us to need this power in the first place. Then is the solution then, not to be the 'chosen one' as the media constantly puts in your head through a thousand super hero films but just to learn to be ordinary and be satisfied by being ordinary?
The mind is not territory and it cannot be owned, though we constantly manifest physical representations of this greed to try to lock the mind down from the outside in...
What is it really to be a rebel?
Very thought-provoking piece.
I think that the same principle applies to movies, fashion and many other cultural artifacts that have been planted on people's mind as if they were in control of those ideas, as if they had actually come up with those goals and opinions.
Being a rebel means to be able to assert that Avengers End Game is a crappy movie, not worth the hype, even if that cost you some friends and relatives :)
As a non-christian, at risk of mis-quoting Jesus, we must hate our family and our community if it means we cannot love the creator.
The point I'm drawing from this outrageous misquotation is that, awareness is our jesus. At the sacrifice of the bullshit, we must pierce the darkness with our light fearlessly.
As a teenager I would be convinced that popular media culture was indeed popular or that it was my own original idea to like the things it pushed. I even believed they held inherent value. Then I joined a group that focused on self-awareness, through breath meditation amongst other things, and observing reality on a constant basis and my interaction with it, I started to see what my choices actually were and how my choices were manipulated through repetition and smart marketing engineered into the group mind.
Consciousness, true consciousness, actually requires that we walk into the flame.
The belief we are conscious and are making conscious decisions just because we were born into a body and have a brain is just that - a belief. Conditioning that has been drummed into us since birth now sitting as part of our core programming in the group mind. The belief system of free-will, the belief system called consciousness, much like the belief system of democracy and equality. We live in a pop up world of belief systems that hold no substance when you look behind the picture.
What if we were raised with awareness that to have free-will, we have to work for it and only a true individual can have the capacity, which is so far removed from the definition of an individual in today's consumer world.
Anyways, thanks for a great comment. All the best, Monti
Thank you for this wonderful follow-up, a post in itself.
No prob, I appreciate you taking the time to read. All the best, Monti
You are so right with it,
most of the minds today are controlled by either repetition or fear/force of law. But its a sad reality that 99% of alive human beings are following this pattern. Including myself, though I am trying to break free from it but its tough given the society, the conditions and the acceptance criterias :(
We cannot fight the effective principle. It is my view that even the 'controllers' are just sitting in a seat that is predefined. There is no deviating from the 'runaway train syndrome' of the group mind. We repeat it over and over again, over many thousands of millennia. History is rewritten and new lots are drawn and the cream always rises to the surface. The toughest, whatever that is in an age, always win.
But much can be said for respect of innocence.
I see this as the contradiction of survivalist mentality. In the times, in our many ages when innocence is respected and the vulnerable are allowed to flourish, new ways of existing have been born - ways not dependent on the 'dog eat dog' default reality.
Survival when held so tightly by the strong, runs away from them.
The weakest of us have been genius minds not born into the cream. A greater chance of survival can therefore be had in the respect of innocence. But there must always be a compromise, a balance, like in anything - to maintain the effective principle, otherwise it would just collapse in on itself and we start again out of nothing.
Leaders take a lot on themselves and most people want to be led, whether willing to admit it or not.
How to change this pattern? Maybe we cannot, maybe we don't.
The effective principle in this reality seems dependent on conflict of opposites. This is a great realisation that conflict is inevitable and even necessary to maintain the structure of our reality. The equality soup that is created through living idealised versions of equality does not work on the long term - polarities always reform and classes develop - recognising this and allowing for it in a safe simulated way gives opportunity to deviate this tendency from violence.
Maybe we're asking all the wrong questions.
Monti
Conflict is inevitable and yes maybe its necessary to maintain what all we have today. Or maybe its all subjective where the massess are following the patterns blindly. And those who deviate are looked at weirdly, seriously see any person around who is not following the normal patterns of anything is called a weirdo. Not fair though.
I am being called a weirdo many times, hate it
We do what we can in the time we are alive, in order to be understood in the best way possible.
What more can be said?
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You said it all
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Here's a comment from my friend Omar in California not on Steemit:
My reply,
Yes, we can express our extra ordinary in ways that assist all and still receive some credit if that's what we still want, but ordinary in the sense that we must remain on equal terms with those around us to maintain maximum efficiency in communication.
It's true communism really. But it's a pipedream for sure.
Yes, maybe small centres of awareness as outgrowths that slowly shift the stream of consciousness into a less capitalizing version of itself.
My notes this morning.. It's called culturally endorsed corporate slavery. Delightful innit?
I digress...
@belfastshaman Do you feel that spiritual beliefs have been commodified in a similar fashion, wearing down their meaningfulness?
A reply from my friend Tom in Australia not on Steemit,
Here is my reply with edits,
I'm also at this point. Learning to be ordinary. Which before, would have shat me as a life not good enough or not worth living, yet now is my panacea.
So yeah, there is still residue of my crazy life before that bleeds into this requirement to be ordinary, but actually, I can now honestly say that even my old desires are fading away as I stop reacting to them. I still have the occasional urge to stir the pot and have inspiration to write about 'important' subjects. But I realise now that written or not, these things on paper aren't going to change the world and that's ok.
It's nice to believe it does though, and separating that belief energy from reality is certainly challenging.
Because real reality, the one I live in today, is just plain. Getting used to this plainness is all there is to do, anything 'extra' is a bonus, but not to be missed if it is taken away. We live in a world where we are constantly told we can have more than life and that's why we have so much trouble living life as it is because we have becomed accustomed to eating rich foods when reality is just potatoes and oranges.
It suits consumer society to have us craving what doesn't exist but what does it do for our happiness? I've met happy people living simply in small villages and when I say happy, I just mean content. Not abundantly joyful but satisfied with the work of their hands and their lives.
We lack this in western consumer culture. I explored this living in a forest squat south of London for eight months back in 2011. I have never been more satisfied with my living. Making my own house, digging a well for water and becoming accustomed to simple pleasures and really enjoying them.
Thanks for your views on the article. This subject has been a realm of observation close to my mind a lot in the past few years. I've finally spat it out in a way that is digestible. So getting it out and really feeling it, and putting it right down to a point in a short article gives me a personal boost because now I can engage in informed discussions on the subject by sharing it.
I also wonder what life would be like if I was born one generation later would I still have found a way to be so 'individual'?
One thing I've noticed with myself is if I ever get too lost in the electronic world I lose motivation to do things I would like to do outside of the electronic world and I also lose that authentic creativity which I keep in a small room in my heart.
By isolating myself from apps and technology, living a normal life and doing things like writing with a pad and pen, finding a routine and generally taking care of myself - I've found a balance.
It's like people need to be taught to walk again.
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Here is a reply from my beautiful friend Maeve Rose who lives in Copenhagen not on Steemit:
A reply from my ex-band member in a band called Sink in 2007-08 called Tim in Perth, Western Australia, not yet on steemit:
My reply,
Wow, great reply.
Thanks for taking the time to read man. It means a lot to me. It's a subject close to my heart. Getting the average person to understand the group mind exists seems to be the forefront of the hard work of the modern day activist. How can a fish know it is in water?