Humans, like many similar creatures, are ‘pod animals’. This means that in order to feel at home in the world and our bodies, we must (generally, there are some exceptions and degrees) belong to extremely intimate, mutually developmentally self-accelerating groups (like our own hands). Throughout most of our evolutionary history, this was our natural state, until a point where the representational aspect of consciousness (and, indeed, our brains, as discussed in many scholarly works but with particularly clarity in Jean Gebser’s ‘The Ever-Present Origin’) began to rise into a subjugative and dominant role in human cultures. This produced a bizarre series of effects and ongoing ramifications, including but not limited to the systematization of ‘spiritual’ activities as ‘religions’ or ‘just the structure’ and the formation of bizarre ‘para-human intelligence collectives’ like those that wiped out and colonized indigenous peoples around the world. Fascinatingly, we undergo this same kind of colonization in childhood, where the ‘pod mind’ of the child comes under assault by the cultural forces in which the and their parents are immersed with the goal of producing ‘an individual’, which is, effectively, like a hand with ‘only one finger’, and a falsified palm (body of unity) and a fake wrist (represented spirit/spirituality). This process is easily observed in nearly all children as going on primarily between the ages of 3-7 (primarily 4-5).

As if this were insufficient, the process continues into adulthood and ‘citizenship’ where we are now ceaselessly and ever more profusely ‘re-colonized’, again by fictional collectives that not only pretend to ‘represent us’, but actively co-opt our own work, relational, health, ecological, social, and financial assets in an ongoing ‘breeding frenzy’ that continuously invades our minds and lives, whilst breeding new domains and methods of invasion, primarily through various processes involving the mimicry of authority, value, liberty, intelligence, wisdom, power, law, and government. This process produces an ever-expanding array of agony, rape, disease, prosecution, incarceration, debilitation and disease in us, who, for the most part, though aware something horrible is taking place, can neither clearly model or talk about it since, indeed, the minds with which we come to see and understand ourselves and the world come ‘pre-co-opted’ in the image of those forces we have been dominated by and enslaved to.

The essential results are what I call ‘the reverse Pinocchio gambit’, a process where, slowly, intentionally, and ever more deeply, real children and cultures are transformed into puppets. Representations more easily and effectively manipulated by falsified collectives which are neither properly human nor alien, but instead, fictional. One of the results of this is an array of ‘conspiracy theories’ that misframe both the problems and the results in relatively paranoid ways. Part of my work as a cognitive activist is the research and exposure of these processes and paradigms, and the invention and delivery of effective methods whereby we may recognize and oppose them, in part by leveraging the very assets they employ against us in a tactically opportunistic fashion and in part by inventing new forms of human cooperative insight, intelligence, and mutuality that we can practice together, right now.

The actual relational, ecological, emotional and intellectual assets we are born with surpass our wildest fictions. The rediscovery, retrieval and re-activation of those assets has been and remains one of my most heartfelt and passionate goals.

I WANT OUR MINDS BACK. NOW.

FREE ALL PRISONERS.