Unleash
The book
The knowledge
Your Self
Into the rabbit-hole
What is to unleash? It’s to embrace the wonder of our human experience and reject the ways in which we come to see ourselves as not normal, not worthy, and less than ideal. Unleashing is to embrace the whole of who we are as an indivisible expression of life. It’s to surrender our fears of the Other and our own shadow, and to reconcile with our human nature. And, until we free ourselves from belief systems that fragment society and the individual and pit one against the other, unleashing is a conscious choice.
As to the purpose of this website, it’s two-fold. First, house “Big Words,” the blog in which I muse on everyday experiences through an unleashed lens. Second, build support for the publication of my book, Unleashed. Let’s face it, knowledge is a commodity and the dissemination of ideas hinges on profitability. Thus, I need your help. Join the unleashed community and venture into the rabbit-hole!
Together, we’ll explore some of the topics at the heart of Unleashed. Why is inequality so pervasive in society? How do we come to perceive some individuals and life forms as worthier and more deserving than others? What exactly dictates this worth, and how is our own worthiness and deservedness calculated? What establishes something or someone as normal or deviant, pretty or ugly, able or disabled, adequate or not? These are but some examples.
Along this exploration you and I will become accomplices with a shared goal: unleash. Our objective will be to do away with the constrictive contraption Friedrich Nietzsche identified in 1887 as our “social straitjacket.” The biggest challenge in unleashing is not our leashes per se, but how attached and dependent on them we have become and the fear that overtakes us at the idea of loosening their grip. Key in all this is the cognitive process we use to construct meaning. We are sensorial beings who experience the world through our senses; and yet, we convey meaning to these experiences through storytelling. Thus, what appears to us as objective is subjective.
Reality, at least from a human perspective, is a construct that depends on the narrator’s perspective. When the prey escapes the predator, do we celebrate the weak for escaping death or commiserate with the strong for suffering hunger? It depends on how the facts are perceived and presented. There is no doubt our storytelling is a valuable cognitive process that enables us to pass along information, weave collective dreams, and decipher the mysteries of the cosmos. Still, it also allows us to rationalize, normalize, and justify things like othering, marginalization, and exploitation. Moreover, because our collective storytelling establishes social expectations most of us are unable to fulfill, it’s at the root of our inadequacies. And yet, being so deeply internalized, our narratives usually go uncontested.
Consequently, the first step in unleashing is awareness. To unleash we must reconsider who we are, who we make ourselves to be, and the driving forces behind this. For this purpose, Unleashed resorts to a transdisciplinary approach of interwoven storytelling that melds embodied experience and theory, sanctioned knowledge and intuited knowing, rational prose and visceral expression. All, to transcend the traditional boundaries of understanding. Readers become aware of the foundational understandings that shape our societies; identify the roots of inequality and the reasons for its prevalence; recognize how othering, marginalization, and exploitation are rationalized, normalized, and justified; and, realize the ways in which our bodies and minds are fragmented so that aspects of Self come to define the whole. From this newly acquired awareness emerges a road to wholeness and visions of a better future. Let the unleashing begin!
