It seems like everyone these days is thinking about liberty. Here in the US, people were feeling so much freer after various COVID restrictions were removed in June and July. Now the clamps are coming down again, with all the fears about the delta variant and emerging talk about vaccine mandates and passports. We may not hear about this in the mainstream media, but huge protests are taking place in all of the major cities of Europe (watch these short videos — video1, video2 — on YouTube before they are removed). Also well worth watching and food for thought is this video.

If you are vaccinated and believed that the vaccines would be super effective and that you were completely in the clear, it may be coming as a rude awakening to now find out that you can still get COVID (and yes, die or be hospitalized) and spread it to others. The fact is, the vaccines are losing their effectiveness against the variants over time. For this reason, Israel, which was one of the first countries to mass-vaccinate is now recommending a booster for those over 60. Soon, boosters will be in the picture for everyone.

On the other hand, if you are unvaccinated because you never trusted that the vaccine would be that effective, knew that naturally gained immunity is always stronger (which it’s proving to be), and feared that the vaccines would be shown to be unsafe in the long-term, you may not be all that surprised that the effectiveness of an untested genetic form of vaccine is waning and becoming less resistant to the growing variants. In fact, as Nobel Prize winning virologist Luc Montagnier has reminded us, variants are almost always triggered by the vaccines themselves, because viruses are always trying to work around them. As a result, the world will be playing a chasing game with COVID variants for many years to come. Hopefully, they will grow weaker over time, not stronger.

Another unfortunate development is the escalating effort to demonize, scapegoat, and bar the unvaccinated from normal life. This is already underway in Europe (spurring the recent mass protests) and is also starting to appear in the US and Canada. Alternative medicine advocates are now being portrayed as domestic terrorists by President Biden and the New York Times. For a fascinating read about this phenomenon, please check out the ever-brilliant Charles Eisenstein’s essay about this subject. Everyone should read it and it should give us all pause.

Also shocking is the banning and cancelling of any form of dissent within the scientific and medical community about COVID and the COVID vaccines, including information about effective allopathic (conventional) treatments for COVID. As a result, respected virologists, vaccine developers, and doctors are now losing their funding and their jobs. Similarly, the CDC’s own data about vaccine injuries, deaths, and hospitalizations is being censored from mainstream media.

So where can liberation be found?

Most of seek our sense of freedom through the external world. We naturally want to do and say and go where we want. No one wants to be forced to hide in the shadows, guard their speech, or not trust strangers or even their own friends. No one wants to be forced into something they don’t want to do or that they believe will harm them. We all want agency and control over our lives. And we all just want to be free to be who we are. This is a basic human need. Without it, we become stressed and eventually diseased.

Unfortunately, because of this, we can also be easily convinced that in order to be free, we may need to enslave or subjugate others, even if the promoted rationale is a lie. As Charles’ essay and the aforementioned video point out, people can easily be manipulated into almost anything, especially if messaging is repeated over and over, fear is constantly stoked, and dissenting voices are blocked. As a result, we cannot truly be sure of “proven science” if all dissenting voices within the scientific community are silenced. And this is especially true if “accepted science” is corrupted by financial forces. Remember that before COVID, most of us knew about the toxic influence of the pharmaceutical giants and their control over both government agencies and almost all medical research.

Happily, however, even the incarcerated and downtrodden can achieve a state of internal liberation and freedom. How so? Because true liberation must ultimately come from within. Remember that if your sense of freedom strictly depends on externals, it will always be subject to diminishment and manipulation by others. To be truly free, to find true liberation, you must find it within yourself. It may not be easy. But it’s possible.

A friend of mine likened our current COVID world and the media surrounding it to a hurricane. It’s so easy to be swept into the swirling fear that is constantly being stoked by the government and medical authorities, the never-ending messaging by the media, and by our own constant participation in that storm through conversation and internal chatter. We may try to escape it by dulling our minds with entertainment, food, or drugs, but eventually we are caught up again in the maelstrom.

The only reliable form of quiet can be found in the center — the eye of the storm. And that center is within. I’ll admit, it’s a constant struggle. We may achieve a bit of peace for a while and then so easily be swept back in. So we need to keep working our way back to that center — perhaps by going out into nature, turning off all media, and meditating. Just as with a storm, we may also be lulled into complacency if the winds seem to have slowed or ended. That’s what happened for a couple of months this summer. But when the storm is restarted or stoked up again by some force, we need to remember to make our way back toward center once again.

Of course, you may also convince yourself that you can escape the storm by going somewhere else. Yes, there may be smaller, weaker storms elsewhere. But ultimately, all of the storms on Earth right now are part of a much bigger storm: not just the global COVID storm, but also the climate disaster storm. Indeed, even countries that have sought to keep out everyone else’s storm — like Australia — are beginning to find out that it’s not really possible to do. We are all caught in a giant storm together and the only way out is for each and every one of us to find our own eye of the storm.

Honestly, doing so can be a daily struggle. I know it is for me. But in my experience, it’s totally worth it. If each of us can manage to find our place of liberation within, we can not only be freed from external manipulation by others, but also achieve the new and peaceful and free world we all want. Not only is this truly necessary right now, but perhaps it’s also the grand opportunity that our universe has created for us so that humanity survives. Because if we can all find our calm center within, our world will be transformed.