Free People Free Themselves – With What?
“Free people free themselves.” That may sound cool or catchy, but repeating that, or agreeing with that is not going to get us closer to freedom. HOW do WE free ourselves? Is there an actual process to this or is “freedom” whatever you believe it is? Today, we’re going to introduce the classical tools for Being free.
In other articles, I’ve quoted U.S. President Woodrow Wilson saying:
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
― Woodrow Wilson
He is telling us about how the society of the United States was going to be reshaped; with a class of privilege receiving a liberal education, and the rest maintained as a class of “necessity,” who won’t understand what a liberal education is or why they barely manage to meet their needs, month after month.
Wilson sold the United States into enslavement to international financed with the creation of the private Federal Reserve Banking System. He started the Internal Revenue Service and got the United States into World War I after the pre-planned and forewarned Lusitania incident; a tremendous legacy of greasing the wheels of future tyranny.
He implemented the cultural and economic transformation that led a society of community-based, independent farmers and craftsmen schooled at home or in one-room schoolhouses, to a society of farmers dispossessed of their land and looking for a “job” and a handout in a soup line.
In 1929, under President Franklin Roosevelt, the United States was 80% rural. In 1935, only six years later, 75% of the population lived in cities.
They got taken to the cleaners. They lost ownership of their lands, their homes, their communities and local, autonomous economies.
Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought in the New Deal. Then World War Two was on. After choosing amnesia to deal with the trauma of the Great Depression which led to the Great Dispossession, and two World Wars bolstering the powers of international high finance, it was “Leave it to Beaver” time (a TV program) and the neurologies of the English-speaking world were brought into the Disneyland gulag through the manufacture of a culture of mind-LESS entertainment and entrainment. The “suburban lifestyle” was first promoted on TV before actual suburbs existed.
Americans were sold on the house on a postage stamp size lot, the car, the incessant television, children raised by two working parents, and the modern lifestyle of people without communities or local economies, life on credit, infinitely-expandable debt-based currency, income tax and a whole top-down management system for everybody’s life.
Within one generation few even remembered what had gotten taken away.
Then in came the sixties, the “me” generation, all kinds of “amazing” spirituality imported from feudal societies from all over the world, and it’s been a steady hoodwink ever since. “Truth doesn’t matter! What truth!? All that matters is how you FEEL!”
Stoned hippies rejected “traditional family values,” without realizing that their “traditional family values” were only one generation old. The patriarchy of the circumcised, sexually-amputated and assaulted males ignored that the whole structure of “the traditional family” was a corporately-mediated invention of the post-Depression and post-Dispossession era, right along with circumcision for most males, and the medico-technological assault of modern childbirth, and instructional facilities massaging the minds of the youth.
Different versions of the same process happened around the world as different versions of the scam were implemented at different times and places, perfecting models for totalitarian management of entire populations.
George Orwell’s model of 1984 was implemented in the hard, authoritarianism, re-education and gulags of the brutal genocide of Eastern European peoples by Jewish Communists, financed by the greatest banking interests, in the Soviet Union. In the West, on the other hand, Huxley’s soft, internalized model of neurological totalitarianism, which he described in A Brave New World, was implemented in the shaping of a permanent citizen-idiot through the mind massage of the Disneyland gulag’s mediated entertainment complex. Both aimed to arrest human development, one through brutal authoritarianism, the other through continual media programming and infantilization and narcissism.
“A government dedicated to the spirit of invasion and conquest will have to corrupt a portion of the people so that they serve them directly in their enterprise… and will have to act upon the rest of the nation from whom it demands passive obedience and sacrifice in order to muddle its reason, falsify its judgment, and to twist its ideas.” -Benjamin Constant (1809) On the spirit of conquest and usurpation)
It’s been fascinating living and teaching around the world, working in depth with people in different cultures, and witnessing first-hand how the culture of the Disneyland gulag is being manufactured in different stages in different places worldwide.
The entire globe has been infected and subjected to local variations of the culture of the USA: the Unwitting States of Amnesia.
Without the tools for leading ourselves into a coherent comprehension of our world, we can be “for” the New Deal or “against” it, but we still won’t have the tools for seeing it in depth and playing out in terms of its consequences.
When Wilson was president, the United States had already been flooded by uneducated European immigrants who were descendants of serfs, booted off their homelands once agricultural advances and the Enclosure Movement started emptying the European countryside of surplus labor. They were shipped to the Americas to kill the Indians and do the hard work of breaking up the sod of the Great Prairie. By 1935, only 45 years after the end of the “Indian Wars” in 1890 most of these had already lost their land and their communities were scattered to the four winds, following the rigged “Great Depression.”
We have been living in “economic crisis” after economic crisis ever since, all variations of the same game that has been played on servile dupes for millenia.
Are “liberals” liberal?
What is a liberal education? What does “liberal” mean? In the United States and, I believe, in much of the British commonwealth, liberal is one more word, like so many we have examined here, that has been twisted to its perfect opposite. It’s meaning has gone from someone who learns to free themselves and take themselves to mastery and self-responsibility, to someone who thinks that anyone who has achieved any measure of mastery superior to their own owes them something and is responsible for them. This is the opposite of liberty. It leads to slavery. Don’t take my word for it, think it through, not just as an idea, but how this had already played out through history.
The free LEARN to master ourselves.
Slaves demand that others do for them what they refuse to do for themselves.
Liberal comes from the Latin liber: “free, unrestricted, unimpeded.” A liberal education, historically in the Western world, is one which embraces the seven liberal arts and is something that is not taught – although you will think you learned them – to commoners and in public schools. Liberal education gives us the tools to free ourselves from our restrictions and impediments, especially those which we inherit through our familial and cultural programming.
Learning them is key to taking clear, coherent possession of our minds, evaluating information and ideas in the light of reality, and not just what “sounds good,” or comes from “official sources.” We acquire the tools to lead ourselves toward self-mastery.
Science or Scientism?
Modern “cultures” build nuclear power plants, based on very expensive and very toxic nuclear fuel, when other sources such as thorium are far more abundant, create radiation shieldable with a sheet of aluminum foil, and with a half-life only micro-fractions of the half-life of the uranium and plutonium currently being used. Nuclear power plants are designed to stay ON when they fail and have been built in tsunami zones, like those at Fukushima, and near earthquake fault lines, like a number in California. My intention in pointing this out is to simply highlight the fact that even our “advanced sciences” are practiced in a way wholly lacking in common sense, as if being carried out by psychotics.
This same approach is used across the board, in medicine, education, agriculture, all to the detriment of the class “devoted to specific manual tasks” which Woodrow Wilson talked about.
This is not intended as a complaint, but as a very notable curiosity, with tremendous consequences for us all. We are living in an integral psychopathology masquerading as “culture.” This is in fact an anti-culture, a frontal assault on Natural, Living Intelligence, human or otherwise. We can wake up, smell the coffee, orient in reality, and still have a tremendous life adventure.
Science presumes knowledge of reality whereas scientism proceeds with experts who ignore the most obvious aspects of reality, while following the commands and regurgitating the “expertise” of their “superiors.” It has become very popular with New Age cultists and other “spiritual” types to criticize “the rational mind” and blame every distortion of psychopathic anti-culture on “rational thought.” Consider that the word rational refers to judgment and understan the ratios and relationships between things.
Unfortunately and quite intentionally, no one subject to public education learns rational thought. Don’t kid yourself, I’m talking about YOU, of course.
Public Indoctrination and the Debasement of “Science.”
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.… The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” Aldous Huxley, the Ultimate Revolution, March 20, 1962 @ Berkeley. [underline added]
What is Critical Thinking?
I spent my career in Critical Care Nursing, after studying Microbiology. I studied the scientific method. I was raised by what many would consider highly-learned and intelligent parents, who thought they taught us to “think critically,” but actually didn’t. Critical thinking is not what happens through criticizing things, or simply “questioning,” or pretending to “be skeptical.” True critical thinking is a precise, deliberate, conscious and orderly process which aligns our thoughts about the world, with the actual world and our senses, removing contradictions between our thoughts and reality.
I only learned this process in the last five years. I was very surprised to discover the power and coherency of the seven liberal arts and to discover that I had never truly learned, much less mastered, them in spite of a lifetime of learning and study.
Jan Irvin’s interviews of Gene Odening on his Gnostic Media podcasts were my first introduction to the liberal arts. Before that I had heard the term “liberal arts” applied to “liberal arts universities” and thought it meant places where art, literature and social sciences are taught, as opposed to the hard sciences. The liberal arts are essential to a coherent understanding of hard sciences and are rooted in the foundations of true knowing.
Critical Thinking Heals
Had I learned and applied true critical thinking when I started getting ill in 2001, I would not have gone around in circles for eight years, adding theory on top of theory, without looking at underlying realities, trying to regain my health after getting severely and increasingly ill. Eventually I did learn it and regained my health, in spite of all the “expert” knowledge I had learned to memorize, follow and parrot to others, as a critical care nurse of twenty years. Essential to my process was learning the Trivium.
I write this to impress upon you the importance of what I am inviting you to explore further on your own. My intention with these articles and my complimentary newsletter is to share practical keys that help us find our way by leading ourselves to powerful source material for those who invest in learning and mastery.
With excellent resources we can take ourselves into the adventure of self-led learning.
Exceptional Times for Self-Led Learning
We are living in exceptional times and can lead ourselves, with skillful and trusted guidance. The education of the free is, of necessity, self-led. The old European universities were NOT places where students spent many hours a day listening to professors give classes. Even today, in places like Oxford University, students (from the Latin studium: “application and care.”) read in their subject matter.
That is the classical education: one goes to the university to find a mentor who can guide our learning process and direct us precisely to those works which allow us to build our understanding of the world from the ground up, through our own learning – not by listening to and regurgitating somebody else’s lectures. Through mastering the skills to lead our lives, we bring our health, wealth, relationships and contributions to brilliant and enjoyable fruition.
We can learn how to do this simply and effectively. It’s a fun and enlightening adventure for those who value their intelligence. Yes, it takes courage, curiosity and deep personal growth to face the truths we discover along the way, but this is precisely what the fulfillment of our humanity has always invited us to.
The seven liberal arts have stood the test of time for many thousands of years – both in freeing people to free themselves, and in allowing those who master them to also lord it over those who refuse to take or ignore, the steps of self-mastery. Those who refuse self-mastery require someone else to become their master and are effectually slaves, regardless if one calls them “citizen” and gives them the vote.
Govern Yourself or Others Will Do It For You
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, at the Opening of the Jamestown Exposition; Norfolk, Virginia, April 26, 1907, said:
“We of this mighty western Republic have to grapple with the dangers that spring from popular self-government tried on a scale incomparably vaster than ever before in the history of mankind, and from an abounding material prosperity greater also than anything which the world has hitherto seen.
As regards the first set of dangers, it behooves us to remember that men can never escape being governed. Either they must govern themselves or they must submit to being governed by others. If from lawlessness or fickleness, from folly or self-indulgence, they refuse to govern themselves then most assuredly in the end they will have to be governed from the outside. They can prevent the need of government from without only by showing they possess the power of government from within. A sovereign cannot make excuses for his failures; a sovereign must accept the responsibility for the exercise of power that inheres in him; and where, as is true in our Republic, the people are sovereign, then the people must show a sober understanding and a sane and steadfast purpose if they are to preserve that orderly liberty upon which as a foundation every republic must rest.
If a nation, whether free or unfree, loses the capacity for self-government, loses the spirit of sobriety and of orderly liberty, then it has no cause to complain of tyranny; but a really great people, a people really capable of freedom and of doing mighty deeds in the world, must work out its own destiny, and must find men who will be its leaders—not its masters.” [emphasis added]
The United States, like much of the world, is overrun by people who have lost their capacity for self-government and responsibility and adamantly refuse to regain it. This will, of necessity, lead us into tyranny and, as I have learned the hard way and as Roosevelt said, we have no cause to complain.
A World of Brilliance at Our Fingertips
Our ancestors were tortured and killed for centuries in Europe simply for being able to read, or for even being in possession of any writings; capital offenses for anyone who was not a member of the clergy. Today we have the libraries of the entire world available to us with a few finger strokes on our smartphones.
We can even have these books read to us, translated for us, etc. We can take classes from some of the finest universities in the world for free. We can listen to lectures and books by some of the most brilliant people while driving down the road, riding the bus or going for a walk. Are you taking advantage of this? We can learn whatever we’d like on almost any topic, delivered in a whole host of formats, according to our preferences.
Simultaneously, our degradation, as people, has been orchestrated on almost all fronts. Essential to this process has been so-called “education,” designed as the perfect opposite of the sense of the term.
Copy and Paste is Not Thinking
To remember something someone else said, and to regurgitate it, is not thinking. This is what the Copy and Paste functions on our computer do. To spell or grammar check is not thinking either, nor is rearranging words and sentences or “coming up with our own ideas,” ungrounded in a sense-able appreciation of reality.
For those who receive my complimentary newsletter, available in the blue boxes in the right-hand column and below, you may already be wondering how modern “medicine” has gotten so far off base, along with just about everything else in our culture. This is no mistake, nor are they “off base.” They are perfectly profitable economic models intentionally designed to destroy the health and intelligence of a disposable “public.” Please mark my words.
Once I discovered the steps to restoring and supporting health easily, I was shocked to discover that these steps have been known, published, and supported by literal tens of thousands of research studies for over one-hundred and fifty years!
Waste Disposal: A Historical and Human Perspective
Eventually the disposable public will be disposed of outright. Given the level of mastery that those who head the power structure have applied to our systematic biological, cultural, linguistic, social, intellectual and spiritual debasement, and the results now obtained, I can’t imagine “disposal” being far off.
In the 20th century 240 million people were slaughtered by their own governments. Human disposal in mass numbers is very much part of the design of modern “societies,” if we still call them that. Seeing first-hand what has happened to people around the world has been, literally, mind-bending and soul-wrenching for me, but only because of my profound misgivings and incomplete comprehension of human reality. Slowly, I learned and integrated reality.
Spending months alone in Nature, growing gardens, walking in tropical rainforests, I begin to more deeply and attentively appreciate what happens in the ecology of any species and what is happening to human “resources” today.
If you wonder what I mean by this, let me just say that it’s Springtime in the Northern hemisphere right now and there are probably ponds, pools and puddles near your home full of tadpoles. Observe them and you’ll learn what I mean from your own experience.
Life is an Invitation to Excellence
Life is an invitation to Excellence. ALL Life is an Invitation to Excellence; either its own or that of another. If we refuse to activate our excellence, we are in effect refusing Life. Please don’t just take that on as an idea. Go out into Nature and observe. See how sloppy a rabbit, a deer, or a beetle can afford to be. Do you truly believe that you are held to a lesser standard? It doesn’t matter how estranged humans have become to our own Nature, we are still subject to Nature’s laws.
Homo sapiens sapiens or Homo ignorans ignorans?
In my travels I discovered a humanity that, in its overwhelming majority, is as neurologically impaired as many patients with severe head injuries. The injury has been done nutritionally, pharmacologically and through the systematic indoctrination of our children in institutions falsely called schools. Falsely pretending to “educate,” they deeply condition “students” into permanent dependency, unquestioning obedience and addictive distraction. Natural intelligence, for most people, gets crippled for a lifetime, transforming human beings into human resources, warping homo sapiens sapiens into homo ignorans ignorans; humans who ignore and ignore that they are ignoring while adamantly insisting on remaining ignorant.
You might be surprised at how many people, around the world, I have had tell me that they choose to be mediocre and prefer to remain ignorant. This, too, is a phase in a cycle.
Brilliant Times for those Who Love Life
Hand-in-hand with this learning, which challenged what I thought I understood about humanity, I also discovered all kinds of fun ways to live richly anywhere in the world, ways to learn languages super-fast and with very little but consistent effort, and all kinds of fascinating insights about our human experience from spending time with people in all kinds of different places and cultures, as well as lots of time observing nature.
I also met people who took advantage of what I showed them, and it was a ball seeing them having way more fun in their lives and activating capacities they didn’t even imagine they had. It’s fun seeing them become the creators of their lives and watching new connections get made. It’s very much like gardening or doing permaculture in the human ecosystem. We begin to GROW, literally, and from our core instead of somebody else’s program.
The intention for Deep Freedom Now is to share powerful keys, perspective people who invest in their learning and excellence. This is who Deep Freedom Now is for. I find life thoroughly more enjoyable when I share with those who WILL, and leave those who WON’T to their chosen path, instead of trying to convince anyone of anything. That’s why these tools are so wonderful. Each one of us can observe reality and then use them on our own.
The world AND WE, are beautiful, capable and creative beyond imagining – if we choose to live in accord with what we ARE. Notice. Awaken. Enjoy!
I have no pretensions of “changing the world” nor of “saving humanity.” The world is changing all on its own. This Reality has far more profound wisdom already pre-installed than most of us imagine.
I am going to point you to the trail head to a true treasure; something you will have to seek out, learn and master on your own over years of study and practice. If Your investment of time, attention, application and care will enable you to enrich your existence, in every way imaginable, for the rest of your life. If you DO the learning, your life will be forever changed, thanks to your own efforts, and thanks to the tremendous contributions of those who have compiled the information, communicated it and made it available to all of us. The treasure you will find is YOU, equipped to come of self-led comprehension of reality.
The seven liberal arts, or the arts of free people, have been divided into the Trivium (or three ways) and the Quadrivium (four ways, or paths). They require using our senses. Once upon a time the trivium was so well known that their mastery was considered trivial, foundational, elementary to any people who were to BE free.
When you hear the much-maligned and misused word “democracy,” it does NOT mean “government by the people.” That’s another line we’ve been sold, along with the fanciful notion that we have a “right” to be free while simultaneously ignorant of how to be free or whether or not we in fact are free, or are slaves.
Democracy is ONLY for the Free, by Definition.
The demoi, in classical Greece, were that 18% of people who were free because they applied themselves to cultivating the ability to free themselves and orient themselves in reality. The remainder were slaves, serfs, bonded people, mentally handicapped and other persons in permanent states of dependency. The latter required a master and were not capable of mastering themselves because they never learned how. HOW the demoi became free was thanks to their kratos: “their power to rule themselves,” which is rooted in the seven liberal arts and a coherent, competent engagement with reality, ALL of reality, including the parts we wish were different and can change, but only if we, decide to act like free people and take responsibility to change them.
Democracy, in the classical Greek system, is NOT a form of governance, nor of voting, nor of majority rule. Classical Greek democracy, in itself, is a way of weaving together a society of self-governing individuals.
Slaves did not get to vote in these societies and for very good reasons. Whereas the necessary aspiration of a free person is to self-mastery, the default aspiration of a slave is to live at someone else’s expense; to effectively enslave another. This is how slavery spreads: from slave to slave and parent to child.
As we’ll learn in following articles, the very sensible system of Greek self-rule was subverted by people in power, thanks to the assistance of a gang of philosophical “guns-for-hire,” the Sophists, who taught, and continue to teach, those in power to overthrow the society of the free. Plato wrote a book on the Sophists whom he described as hunters of men who hunted by laying traps.
After monarchy they subjugated entire nation-states by one very, very clever ruse: giving slaves the right to vote . They knew that slaves would vote themselves into whatever fulfills one simple criteria: it sounds advantageous to the slaves, who never ask who is going to foot the bill and at what cost. Slaves, like children who have not learned or achieved self-mastery, will vote themselves into any benefit that appeals to them, at the cost of their most essential freedoms and in avoidance of their most basic responsibilities which, in any case, are insistently ignored by them and go hand-in-hand. Give slaves the vote without teaching the arts of freeing themselves and pretty soon even the free are debased to slaves.
Study the history of Europe of the last 1500-2000 years and you will eventually realize that 99% of the population of the descendants of the tribes of Europe are effectively slaves, all the way to the present day. Yes, that’s you and me, I’m talking about, our culture, our habits, our ways of relating to each other, of “learning,” of “debating” and “arguing” everything but paying attention to and listening very little.
Every so-called “democracy” in the West is led by the extreme few while still engaging in the charade of “voting” and “democracy.” The extreme few are not to be blamed for having their way with a people who refuse to lead and take responsibility for their own lives, sustenance and choices. They do for the many what the many refuse to do for themselves.
Carroll Quigley, who studied the power elite of the Anglo-American establishment and whose very worthwhile lectures are available via youtube, outlined how the “slave-ocracy” game is played. Many years ago, I found it shocking that Quigley did not object to this system but rather found it necessary. I didn’t realize that this system is also demanded from below, especially in the case of the descendants of Europeans.
Here’s what Quigley says about the current system in the United States, but if you look worldwide, most countries are already, de facto, in a two-party system:
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. … Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies. [Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 1247-1248.]
Look at the social makeup of the United States, Europe and much of the world today. These are highly-sophisticated, post-agricultural and post-industrial slave societies. Surprisingly, they are still democracies, in the classical Greek understanding, except that today the percentage of people who are demoi and can effectively exercise kratos, and do, are far less than 0.001%. The rest are slaves who can be counted on to consistently vote themselves, generation after generation, further and further into slavery and mediocrity, eagerly inserting themselves into the “kiss up, kick down” chains of command as soon as they see a benefit offered to them hand-in-hand with the option of avoiding personal responsibility for the actions of the organizations they serve and are served by.
It is a fascinating state of affairs. As I pay closer attention to it and the Principles that Nature unfolds in, I see its Perfection. I choose to enjoy my time here in this peculiar strangeness thoroughly. I have no pretension of “changing the system.” The system is in the process of destroying and reinventing itself. Our challenge is to outlast it and perhaps outwit it.
In “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” C.S. Lewis describes how a very prestigious “Devil” lectures newly graduated “Tempters” on how to collect souls:
“Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t…You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power…
Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic…
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence — moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods?…
For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or simper at the first hint of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be.” [underline added]
Slave societies and slave cultures are not created by masters so much as by other slaves, starting with mothers, parents and schoolteachers, from the womb to the tomb. Slavery is applied art and science, whose ultimate expression is a contented slave who ignores, or even demands his own enslavement. Aldous Huxley, in a letter to George Orwell, wrote:
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
An essential part of each freeman’s kratos, or power to self-rule, is learning the seven liberal arts. This formed the basis of initiation for any free adult, whether in classical Greece or ancient Egypt. A number of indigenous people I have spent time with had even more effective ways of teaching these arts than the Greeks, as they are natural to all forms of life that haven’t been domesticated into debasement, and still capably free.
Study the cultures of the ancient Egyptian, Inca or any of the ancient, megalithic cultures’ architecture, astronomy and cosmological knowledge, you will discover that they are coherent with the entirety of reality, from the ground to the stars. These people did NOT build nuclear power plants, or their equivalents, on seismic fault lines. On the contrary; their works, whether the Great Pyramid at Giza, or the stones of Sacsayhuamán, stand in testimony to the nature of their Mastery.
Delve more deeply into the Trivium and Quadrivium and you will understand why the power elite has very intentionally removed them from the “school” curriculum of the masses.
Today they are available to you, at your fingertips. All you need to receive them is some application and care.
The Trivium: Three Paths to Mastery
The Trivium is composed of three arts: Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric.
Your eyes may very well glaze over upon reading that. Public education is designed to insure that they do. But these do not refer to the dry, intellectual cracker-bread you were fed in “school.”
What do you think of when you hear grammar? Those who learn the servile arts (slaves, serfs, “human resources”) only learn the grammar of language, of medicine, or whatever trade they are in. These are known as specific grammar. What slaves don’t get taught is General Grammar: the grammar and organization of reality, which is not learned at a blackboard, but is apprised through skillful use of our five senses in the world. This is discovered by asking the simple questions of who, what, where & when, and all of their variations, in order to begin making an inventory of objective facts.
This is part of the art of Tracking which is natural to all life forms, except the domesticated ones. When I first started apprenticing with my teacher back in 1984 one of the first things he told me was that I could not See, Hear, Move OR Read. I could only spell and remain spellbound by words, while remaining oblivious to the reality beyond the words.
The grammar of reality is arrived at by making close, patient, detailed, connective observations of reality with our own senses and intelligence.
Logic then looks at the data collected and observations made in order to remove the contradictions.
Rhetoric then looks at how to communicate a message and how messages have been communicated, especially in light of the grammar of the reality we are examining and the work of Logic we have done. Mastering Rhetoric demands a coherent grasp of what logical fallacies are and how they are used to create false impressions. Once you get a solid grasp of logical fallacies, listen to or read what passes for news, science and politics today, you’ll be amazed at how fallacies are being used in the general media and culture, mainstream and “alternative.”
Mastering the arts of Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric allows us to be self-led, independent learners. We can then orient ourselves in reality and objectively verify and/or correct our comprehension of our world.
The Quadrivium
Once the Trivium is mastered, then one learns the Quadrivium, composed of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy, taught in a manner that reveals the coherence and relationships between them and in our world. This lays the foundation for true knowing, for true science conducted in the deep appreciation of relationship and emergence. Arithmetic is pure number. Geometry is number in space. Music is number in time. Astronomy is number in time and space. Once we build the foundation of understanding our world coherently, we can then apply this same process to any other science or study of our world.
Adventure into Learning
Jan Irvin has compiled a list of resources for learning more about the Trivium and Quadrivium. Lovers of learning and self-mastery will greatly benefit from listening to all of the interviews of Gene Odening, as well as the video with Kenneth Cole, and then delving deeper into the documents at the bottom of Gene Odening’s outline. Some of the download links at www.triviumeducation.com are to other websites. You may have to link through to the websites where the original interviews were done to download the files, which are included at the beginning of each sub-article. They are all available as of this writing, but many are NOT available via the “download” links on the www.triviumeducation.com website. Nevertheless, every resource, if opened in a separate tab, gives the original website link.
Once you can clearly identify what happens when you put logic before grammar, you’ll be getting a handle on the importance of learning to think as free people do: in possession of our own mind, instead of letting it get blown here and there by impressions.
“Literacy is a form of slavery until a systematic form of critical thinking is practiced by the reader.” -Richard Grove www.tragedyandhope.com
Jan Irvin’s www.TriviumEducation.com website provides the links to a thorough introduction to the Trivium and Quadrivium. After listening to the Gene Odening interviews and the youtube video by Kenneth Cole, learn the logical fallacies. They make for great sport next time you hear a priest, politician or “newsman” talking!
This is a trailhead to self-education for gaining further tools for self-leadership. If you take the Journey, then the treasure to be found at the end of the trailhead is YOU, with another of level of mastery cultivated and made real. It is up to you. As the French writer Robert Sabatier said,
“Those who refuse to learn self-mastery soon enough find another master.”
If you enjoyed this article, share it with friends. and get a group of friends to study the Trivium and Quadrivium together, with each person taking on one part and teaching it to the rest. You will be gaining the tools to lead your own life in coherent engagement with reality and with like-spirited and True friends. I offer a complimentary newsletter which you can sign up for in the blue box to the right. Right now I’m also organizing an amazing Adventure in Thriving in Mexico for Passionate, Creative, and Freedom and Life-Loving People. If you feel called, come join us. It will be a life-changer!
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[…] The Greeks recognized seven liberal arts which, in the Middle Ages, were divided into two parts: the Trivium (or three roads) and the Quadrivium (four roads). The Trivium were so fundamental and basic to the education of any free person that they were considered trivial, basic and foundational. These were covered in our article Tools for Being Free. […]