Evan Bones Kendall's Site

"Free your mind" means...

I actually always wondered. There's Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" in which he sings, "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds." The movie The Matrix also gets into this idea of minds that are slaves.

I came across some of these ideas reading writers like Franz Fanon and other post-colonial theorists.

To free one's mind is to declare it free from colonialism, which these days is a kind of economic colonialism. It is no longer state-sponsored, though nations can help and hinder the spread and domination that is at stake in creating dependency in colonized people.

But that gets into too political an argument for this post, wherein I'm still focused on love.

The other kind of freeing one's mind means being free to imagine. It turns out that our imaginations are a bit like wine. It takes being exposed to imagination sharing. Also, it takes time to develop preferences and tolerances and specialized knowledge and tastes.

It also takes getting outside of one's environment, at least in one's mind, which is why it's called mental slavery.

Not that I'm a doctor, but if I were, I'd prescribe some good imaginative literature, especially some classics.

But also don't underestimate the value of getting outside of one's own culture. Well, that also can be done in literature. But I mean to travel, eat, and even love across borders...all that is good for freeing one's mind.

Free to do what? Free to see things differently, according to one's own perspective.