Before that, I was strongly bound by what "they" think about every single aspect of myself. I always deferred to the authority or the source or the media or whatever. It was hard, but I had to work on learning to think critically for my own self for the first time in my life, in order to pass my classes. And then it helped me to blossom as a Rainbow and as a wild human.
Many people who focus on fighting for causes and ideals have on some level or another realized that it is totally futile to fight for their own causes and ideals, so they somehow project it onto outward institutions, in order to create a meaningful and passionate life. This is just one step along the path of maturity. Until we reach maturity, we appear to be ambitiously directing ourselves to think critically, on behalf of a cause or ideal, but in reality, we have actually accepted alienation from our own unique desires, causes and ideals. This was my state of being until I was struck by the lightning bolt idea of forming the Wild Human Initiative, a lightning bolt delivered by a fellow wild human named Cory, who had tramped like a homebum thru dreams and nightmares, and was very alive and able to think for himself specifically as a wild human. His influence changed my life in ways that will ripple and echo forever, as it touches my children and everyone I meet and know. That is just a small part of the power of thinking for yourself as a wild human. It gives you courage and authenticity and a true voice amid the clamor of soulless voices in this often programmed world. You gain the power to create something new that is progressive, unique, and just right for you, rather than something that is generic, cookie cutter, Martha Stewart, Disneyland, white bread style.
Anyway, even if you think you are a revolutionary, your actions are just reactionary if you are acting on behalf of a cause or a desire or an ideal outside of your own truth and experience. (Kind of like the yucky feeling you get when you feel pressured to subscribe to a religion you don't really believe in--as I was for my first 23 years--versus the power and beauty of subscribing to that same religion in my late thirties when it finally resonated with my own personal truth and experience).
It's hard to think for yourself as a wild human when you are being suffocated by anyone else's ideologies, whether religious, political, economic or social. You have to dumb yourself down and subjugate yourself to the group mindset in order to function or survive. A friend of mine used to say with a sly smile..."Who wants to be sane in an insane world?" He had a sense that he was the only one who was actually thinking and perceiving anything with total clarity, and I believe he was right. He's another friend who served to awaken and liberate me by teaching me to think for myself.
By actively, critically, step-by-step struggling to think for your own self, to realize your own feelings and thoughts about something--rather than by accepting and embracing predigested and preconceived notions--you reclaim your own mind as your very own. You take it back!!! And you do with it what you will, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, on your own. That is a big part of maturity.
Do you know how to think for yourself, to create a body of thoughts and ethics that will serve you well, that will help you to understand why your life and the world are the way they are? As you learn to think for yourself, as you develop this body of thought for yourself as a wild human, you will also develop a methodology for creating the life you want. It just happens naturally. It doesn't really need explaining, but these are my thoughts today, so I'm sharing them with you.
Your wild human way of thinking will end up being very practical as well as magical. It will guide you in your actions each and every day, just naturally, as it develops. It will lead to you realizing your wild human dreams and desires. The first step is learning to think critically for yourself as you examine yourself, your life and the world at large.
This is what makes thinking for yourself a wild human pleasure. It leads to subversion of the dominant paradigms. It empowers you. It influences the transformation of society. It deconstructs some of your long domestication, so you can be more creative, authentic, and courageous in your daily and long term life.
Thinking for yourself shows you what you really want for yourself, and shows you how you need to go about getting it. As a tribal person, this may be both self-centered and altruistic. By taking care of yourself, you are indirectly taking care of everyone else. You will see.
Anything that serves to maintain the status quo, and uses you as an object to keep it going, is not wild human and does not represent thinking for yourself. Those things give you a false consciousness and force you to wear a mask and conform to some degree, where wild humanism is about your personal experience with having your own true consciousness that aims to attain your own true desires, regardless of the ideologies that support the status quo. You have an interesting, unique face, and you don't wear a mask. You are a living breathing feeling human being, not a "human resource" or a "tax id number" or a "statistic". You are a wild human.
Many people don't want to know how to think for themselves. The ideologies and systems that think for you make your life easier, so you don't have to think fully for yourself, and the responsibility belongs to someone else. An example that leaps to mind is entertainment. It's quite a challenge to learn to entertain yourself in a satisfying way, and requires much thought and creativity and effort. But it's totally easy to turn on the tv, go to the movies, pop in a cd, etc. One is artificial, one is authentic. Think about it and decide for yourself.
Those things, and also drugs, keep you from fully realizing your roles and your power in the world as it is today. You are too busy watching tv, going to the mall, getting drunk, surfing the web, chasing your vices and addictions, to do anything about the circumstances that oppress and program you and everyone else, if you don't learn to think critically and use these things as tools for empowerment. That's the way the powers that be want it. And it's a function of the wild humans, with our cultural, intellectual and other diversities, to thwart that. The way to do that is to think and choose for yourself. That's the revolutionary pleasure of thinking for yourself.
These things like tv and conspicuous consumption and mainstream Christianity serve to separate you from an authentic experience of your life, and also demand a lot of sacrifices from you, which you will willingly make until you are fed up, you rebel, and you insist on thinking and living in ways that are true and real. You become a person rather than a tool of the false idols that I mentioned.These false idols demand your conformity, your duty to serve them, and your patriotism to the dominant social order. Wild humans tend to find it difficult to serve the false idols, and soul sickness will result until we empower ourselves by thinking for ourselves in all areas of our life, even when opposed and persecuted. Even if we go down, we go down fighting, as conscientious objectors. I have lived this truth, my friends.
We learn to think for ourselves as wild humans by asking ourselves, "How do I really feel? How is my life at this point? What do I want to experience? Am I getting what I want by living this way? If not, why not?" This is called consciousness, awareness. Every day you do this, your real life emerges more and more from up out of the matrix of programming and oppression that keep the status quo and the dominant social themes and authorities in place.
One way to think for yourself is to really see the inside-out, upside-down nature of life today. It costs money to love God, via televangelism, happiness becomes a commodity with absurd trinkets like smiley buttons, impersonal radio stations claim they love you, and dish soap companies claim they care about your skin and your family, when really they don't. They just want your money, so they have to get you to buy their product.
Another way is to reject conversational sedatives, like "Don't worry, be happy", or "You can't always get what you want", or "Life has it's ups and downs". These are intellectual shortcuts that shortcircuit your authentic truth and experience. Every day, people deny themselves an authentic life, and then go to the mall or whatever and lay down their hard earned dollars to buy back the shit that dumbed them down in the first place. Stop doing this and think for yourself! Go deeper!!!
Thinking for yourself helps you develop a coherent set of tactics to transform your world. You must do this in order to transcend the rage or the depression at the systems that try to destroy you. I was the victim of the depression aspect of this. But other people commit suicide, or kill other people, or blow up buildings. You must learn to think for yourself as a wild human to transcend the need to do these kinds of things and live a good life.
In thinking for yourself, you can work toward your own self-realization, or you can reach out and work with other free thinking wild humans on collective projects for our overall self-realization. Imagine that! I love to imagine that.
When you think for yourself in authentic and revolutionary ways, the gradual and sometimes immediate result is transformation of our social inter-relations and transformation of the world as a result of realizing our wild human desires. It works, I promise you.
Have you noticed in therapy how they try to get you to "adjust", to "mainstream", to "normalize"?!?!?!? I have. And I think it's dumbing down, oppressive bullshit!!!! The healing of any individual and the healing of some aspect of society must go hand in hand. Like the healing of sexual abuse victims must go hand in hand with the healing of the abusers, for example in the Catholic church or in foster homes. It's systemic. They will not think for themselves, being systemic, and you should not adjust to the perverse realities involved, so you have to start the process with your own self. By thinking deeply and changing your own life no matter what anyone else thinks, you change the nature of social life in general, like a ripple effect.
Think about this. In today's society, we are each expected to play a role, and to play it well, for better or for worse. We have to get in character, repress our feelings, put on our social armor, and go to work, or to school, or to church, or whatever. We have to pose as what we are expected to be, and conceal our true desires, as a defense against the attacks of other people if we don't "play our part". We HAVE to bravely shed these roles and communicate without this kind of role playing in order to transform society and ourselves. When we stop playing our individual roles on a mass level, then society will stop playing it's roles too, because no one will be participating in that old game anymore. It starts with thinking for ourselves, as wild humans.
