FREE
HYBACHI
LEMAR

Listen to a recording of Hybachi LeMar’s presentation at the Chicago Anarchist Skillshare, “Abolishing the Prison Industrial Complex In Our Minds (with I.D.E.A.S.)“:

Alright, right on. It’s me – your disembodied voice. This evening’s presentation will be a brief one, but it’s one I wrote as an antidote, that once remembered, can help you in any situation. The name of the presentation tonight is “Abolishing the Prison Industrial Complex in the Mind (with I.D.E.A.S.)”

I wrote this because a lot of us feel like we’ve been living in a prison inside ourselves all our lives. If you relate, you know just what I’m talking about. In an era where so many of us simply feel out of place in this world. Our disconnection is intimately related with knowing we don’t fit in, and this society that socially engineers to marginalize us. Then they board up the windows in our neighborhoods, but they can’t board up our minds. If anything, we find ways to turn boardups as a base area of resistance.

Those in power look at us like we don’t belong, but who are they to judge us? A class that’s been kicked-out and pent-in, who drink to escape! The marginalized, the excluded, who piss in alleys after being told the washroom is for “paying customers only”, who grow up ready to start shooting at police, after seeing how ready they are to start shooting at us.

Enough with this to get it together: to the abolitionist, exercising, and saying “yes”, from your wheelchairs and walkers, I hope you know how loved and important you are. Together, we can help each other, heal each other, and liberate ourselves from complexes unworthy of us, using I.D.E.A.S.

And making the conscious choice to devote our lives to the liberation struggle, it’s important that we wage war against self-directed oppression. And in this fight for our collective freedom, it’s essential that we dismantle the prison industrial complex inside of our minds.

It all starts with “I”: The I in Ideas represents Introspection, it involves taking an inward look at ourselves, and questioning our existence. Who am I? Am I content with the way I carry myself? What parts of my character do I like, what parts would I like to change? Have I evolved over the past ten years of my life? Asking ourselves these personal questions lies at the core of our mental solutions. When we know the answer to these questions, we act in ways which become satisfied with the way that we carry ourselves. Not in the past, but right now, in the present, this very moment in life.

The “D” in Ideas is for Devotion: devotion of purpose, to be exact. And knowing our purpose, and living it, we deliver ourselves from repeated the mistakes from our past and living testament of the truth that we’re now abiding. And in renouncing our former state of ignorance, we receive revolutionary redemption. Devoting our lives to a mission gives it meaning. When oppressive forces can drive us to feel like our mental health is going off-kilter, remembering our devotion of purpose helps us center ourselves and to maintain presence of mind. Our class has been conditioned to create our own prisons, and in both the material as well as the mental, we see an arrested development.

The third letter in Ideas represents Education: education as an instrument for our liberation, to be precise. As Anthony Rayson reminds us, the great Leo Tolstoy says that “the purpose of education is freedom”. Liberation education is invaluable in freeing ourselves from the psychological isolation so many of us have suffered inside of, whether as a punishment in an institution, or self-imposed in the sanctuary of open society. Abolitionist schools such as South Chicago ABC, Books Through Bars, and Midwest Books to Prisoners, are dual power structures in the field of counter-cultural education. I’m thankful for them. They facilitate in opening the mind to alternatives for revolutionaries in barbaric behavior modification programs and “cage your rage”. It’s important to bear in mind that it’s not the urban novels that glorify gangbanging that gets denied from the hands of prisoners, it’s the idea against institutionalized injustice that are banned as institutionally dangerous.

The brilliant anarchist from Brazil Domingos Passos is celebrated in Rio De Janeiro and abroad on account of his intellect and oratorical gift which he has honed in the day-to-day struggle of his trade, as a carpenter, anarchist, and militant union delegate in the early 20th century.

In 1923, fellow worker Oralndo Simoneck reflected that a remarkable feature of Domingos Passos was his relentless self-educated drive, that search for learning and culture which found him strenuously pouring over books. Domingos was known as an autodidact, meaning self-taught. Compa Domingos Passos was an expert at free-thinking, free-thinking meaning you being the one in control of your thoughtlife, and involves using the education we received to deprogram ourselves from years of government indoctrination.

Bakunin taught that we can’t subordinate our body’s instincts and movements to the instruction of our developing minds except through education and training. We free ourselves from being ignorant of our potential with education and by working on ourselves with the knowledge.

The “A” in Ideas represents Application. Applying the knowledge, we take time to reflect on, and the cause produces substantial effects. Using the knowledge we now become a living representation of what we’ve learned: as representations of knowledge, we experience it in an evocative way. It feels free to carry ourselves in harmony with our ideals, and this comes with applying to our lives the knowledge we learn.

For example, anything that we do for 21 consecutive days is, definitively speaking, a habit. Compa Nimmy teaches to always carry yourself with dignity and respect: if we do this for three weeks carrying ourselves in this way, it becomes second nature. This is helpful for several ways: one of them being that when we keep our head up, we’re able to see eye-to-eye with each other with genuine understanding. Another reason is that each of us have potential and value: knowing this power, as Anthony Browder advised, makes study and the application of knowledge a daily priority in your life.

Solidarity: the final letter, and the formula to carry with us when we can use it, is the “S” symbolizing solidarity. Abolition is a collective effort: we help each other free each other, and this is truly a revolutionary endeavor. Genuine understanding, and the recognition of the need to deprogram ourselves from a life of systemic indoctrinations, gives us the collective clarity and consistency needed to heal each other with empathy and emotional mutual aid. We release each other from the prisons of emotional pain, and in so doing, strengthens our numbers as well as the mind in the process. It only takes two people to form an affinity group: this can be done in a bus stop, a prison cell, or on the sidewalk in the streets.

In conclusion, those of us who know what it’s like to do without, whether it’s love, a place to lay our heads, something to eat, or living with the feeling that you’re not understood. You’re not alone, and in fact, you’re existentially great, with the feeling of intimacy that’s usually found among the philosophically orphaned.

We have something more valuable than money: we have freedom and love, and once we have them, neither can be taken away from inside us. Saidiya Hartman wrote that “anarchism is the inheritance of the dispossessed”, and the simplicity of this formula makes it easy to carry with you if you find yourselves confined in a complex situation. As mentioned, just as short and sweet: dissolving the prison industrial complex in the mind makes it easier to remove the sophisticated cages constructed throughout corporate America and beyond.

With this, I close, and I send you my solidarity, love and strength.

Solidarity to all the Venezuelan Migrants, and all looking for freedom, and fighting for it, solidarity, love and strength!

Thank you. I could literally feel all yall in my heartbeat! Gratitude!

Hybachi LeMar speaks from Cook County Jail:

May these teachings empower you.

No matter how lonely you may feel in this world, regardless how deep the degree of depression – there’s no circumstance so consuming, no dilemma so dark, that it can inhibit your inherent ability to enlighten yourself. Self-enlightenment enables you to be in touch of who you essentially are. It releases yourself from the restraints of blind obedience you’ve chosen to disconnect from. It’s a tapping-in that enables the disinherited to see in the dark. To us, it’s presented as knowledge of self, and with this knowledge comes many powers.

One such gift that comes with this knowledge is the nature of intuition: the stages of Kemet upheld it as the most important quality to develop. It’s known as Tehuti, a faculty of self-enlightenment, that in the hour we bid intellectual confusions of this world good night, that the eye of our intuition becomes awakened. In the Ifa philosophy from Ille Ise known today as Nigeria, the Orisha of knowledge is known as Orunmila. Becoming intimately one with his energy can generate light to the lightless. The energy of knowledge invoked infuses those who possess it with evocative powers. Orunmila, the Orisha of knowledge is also known as a doctor. Ela loses it, Ela binds it. Ela is another name for Orunmila.

With the practical use of knowledge, we can specifically isolate things that cause dis-ease: we can lose it, and we can bind it. Using knowledge to detach our minds from the dis-ease gives us immense power to heal ourselves from the emotional symptoms once we release it. Every affect is created from the cause that produced it: the mind has a direct influence on the emotions. We can alter the way tha we feel by controlling the way that we think.

Orunmila, Orisha of knowledge, known also as Ela Wori, saves society from confusion with the clarity of it’s nature. It’s the power that can bring order out of apparent chaos. It’s the repairer of ill luck. No amount of money is accepted in the receptive nature of knowledge: it’s invaluably priceless. Ifa philosophy teaches that there is no child bearing person who could not give birth to Orunmila. In Kemet, where the teachings of Tahuti was delivered. it was taught that self-knowledge is the basis of all true knowledge. We know what works for us and what doesn’t: reliance outside of anything outside of us for approval has led to a series of unnecessary psychosis.

It’s beneficial therefore to remember that you are not the mistakes that you’ve made, nor are you the ephemeral nature of the emotions: neither are you your body, but the consciousness possessing it, and these are your powers:

You have the power to find clarity by tapping into your intuition.
You have the autonomous power to think for yourself.
You have the power to release from your mind the things that cause it dis-ease, and to receive the knowledge that comes from within to restore it to health.
You have the power to heal from suffering due to any errors from judgement, and if you feel so degraded that you isolate yourself in the dark, you have the power to doctor your heart as an emissary of light.
You have the power to navigate successfully through the night.

Recognizing that the mind has a direct influence on the emotions, we find that we can change the way that we feel by being in control of our minds. The essence of reality isn’t in the circumstances which is subject to change, but in the subject who at any given moment can change it. No matter how condescending the insult, regardless of how much force the arms of repression may be applied in the struggle to keep you down, once you are aware of who you essentially are, nothing can keep your immaterial mind from rising above any circumstance experienced in the material world.

Listen to an audio recording of Hybachi LeMar calling in from Cook County Jail to speak at Running Down The Walls:

Run down the walls that renders those they confine as constitutional slaves under the 13th Amendment, which targets those that woke from within the walls that marginalize us, runs collectively through our veins. Run down the walls… Run down the walls of Cook County Kitchen, where mice eat through the bags of bread that are served with only the bitten slices allowed to be the ones tossed out… Run down the walls connecting with the sinks that leak unknown black substances on Division 5. Run down the black moldy showers where detainees are resorting to using the styrofoam lunch trays as shower shoes. Run down the walls that warehouse human beings suffering in the dorms in Division 2. Run down the walls that keep people from seeing light for weeks on end. Run down the plaster-chipped walls that divide us. Run it down. Detainees at Cook County Jail no longer have a law library to attend before arriving before the courts. Run it down. Detainees at Cook County Jail are often retaliated against by Corrections staff for filing grievances on administrative misconduct. Run it down. Those of us fighting from the inside stand in solidarity with you all, and those running down the walls of oppression worldwide. Solidarity! Appreciate you all coming out tonight. Gratitude!

Listen to a recording of Hybachi LeMar from Cook County Jail “The Unmanacling of the Mind” part 3: (also see Part 1 and Part 2)

Regardless of the miseducation that we received, despite what we see with our eyes, the sun doesn’t rise in the east and set in the West. It’s the Earth, which actually sets in its revolution around the Sun, making it appear to rise in the morning, and it’s the rise of the Earth, and it’s orbital inclination which makes the sun appear to set every night. What we perceive as a sunrise, is really an EarthSet. And the sunset, an EarthRise. This obviously goes against common sense, and how Dusk and Dawn is viewed when we look at the news, which instead of re-educating people along the lines of reality, reinforces illusions. When asked, “what makes the world go round?” The common reply is “money”, when actually it’s inertia. Inertia, the scientific principle of maintaining, meaning, an object in motion moves at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force. And that an object at rest, relatively speaking, stays at rest. Another misconception that’s arrested our development is that people never change. Yet life changing epiphanies are happening everyday. We’ve been led to feel that we have no potential. So many of us walk the alleyways feeling worthless. It’d be safe to conclude that a substantial amount of people in this world actually grow up without knowing right from wrong. Those struggling with survivors’ guilt aren’t solely to be blamed for their errors in judgment. The position we find ourselves in has been politically protracted. The path the population’s been geared to follow has been laid out from blueprints, governing the way Society moves, from miseducation to genocide. We’ve been socially engineered. For example, their schools don’t teach how we could solve the problem of poverty altogether and gain astronomical levels of surplus in the process, by replacing capitalism with the self-sustaining momentum of mutual aid, or how struggling to make ends meet everyday in the world can be circumvented, by sharing the things we produce at work with our communities instead of submitting our labor power to corporations and bosses. We’ve been disarmed from grasping the life-changing potential – [YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE REMAINING]– being baited by a big fish eat little fish way of life, has left the majority of human beings underwater. Predatory capitalism has reeled us into a velocity of violence. A constant state of socio-economic instability, out of sync with the world and essentially with ourselves. In dividing truth from non-truth, become disillusioned! Move with self-sustaining momentum. Let nothing discourage you from your course. Rise in courage with the reminder that it’s The Cutting Edge moments when our world appears to be going down right in front of our eyes, when Paradigm shifting realizations begin to dawn.

[THANK YOU FOR USING GLOBAL TEL-LINK]

Listen to a recording of Hybachi LeMar from Cook County Jail “The Unmanacling of the Mind” part 2: (also see Part 1 and Part 3)

The mind, unfettered from the cuffs it’s been conditioned to wear, is able to step forward by the determined Act of the will. That proactive step forward is a revolutionary Act. In the snap of a finger [SNAP], we can release ourselves from the tyrannical chain of emotions, now no longer holding us back. Crossing the threshold, is to break free from the limits of unenlightened awareness, into an atmosphere of mental illumination. We deliberately use the force of Will, the faculty in Africa known as HeruKhuti, to free ourselves from the facades we’ve associated ourselves with, like fallen chains. Separating ourselves from the impermanent nature of our personas alleviates us from suffering the consequences of their conditions. The despair of dark depression, the heartaches, and the sense of Intolerable loneliness are ties we sever ourselves from with self-disciplined detachment. The name HeruKhuti is not merely a faculty we can tap into, it’s also an alchemical formula, when broken down and intimately internalized. Heru, is defined as the Will of the higher self. Awakened. Khut, means brilliance and splendor, the kind that emanates from the Sun. And Ti means Two. HeruKhuti has been known as, He Who is Upon the Double Horizon, by egyptologists. The degree of inner standing this nature extends into the illuminating reaches of Kemetic antiquity. The word Ru, in the word HeRuKhuTi also relates to Divine Utterance, and the tongue, though being barely 7 inches in length, can shift the paradigm of the planet. The emancipatory powers that come in being in direct possession of this faculty, becomes crystal clear in our redirecting of focus. Your ability to cut yourself free from what restricts a close connection with self will expand your sense of awareness. Your ability to divide darkness from light is a responsible power.

Listen to a recording of Hybachi LeMar from Cook County Jail “The Unmanacling of the Mind” part 1: (also see Part 2 and Part 3)

This message is being delivered to you who suffer alone in the night, looking for a way out, who may be so misunderstood, who may even be thinking of suicide. It could be due to internalizing false perceptions of self, being confined to the miseducation that you received, or not having any real guidance in school, at home, or in the streets.

It’s my intention that this message be used to wrap it’s arms around you who feel alone in this world, and to deliver it to you whose will may be weak. In it, to find revolutionary redemption, with the transformative powers of truth, leaving the illusions of worthlessness behind and liberating relief.

The Unmanacling of the Mind – by Hybachi LeMar.

There comes a time when each of us must come face to face before the mirror of self reflection. This most monumental of movements, this self-directed decision, this unaccompanied step – marks the pivotal moment of it’s emancipation.

While paradigm shifting perspectives, such as collectivism, anarchist communism, and mutual aid, extend to us illuminating ways to overthrow governments with as a society, anarchist education involves, essentially, a crossing of the threshold of consciousness, a sense of self we arrive at, a clarity in the conscious mind.

It shouldn’t be any surprise why this education isn’t taught in public schools, or why the governments that sanction them brand us as terrorists and ban our pamphlets and books. The conquest of consciousness perceived recruitment into imperialist wars of monopolists who make their living value off of profit margins over the people who live marginalized. It drills a prejudice of patriotic pride to the memory of our class at an age when the minds of the students are impressionable the most.

The consequence of this mental monopolization is responsible for the loss of hundreds of millions of lives, the maiming of morale, and the paralysis of intercontinental detention. Social studies classes ironically have led to anti-socialist acts that have split us apart like the atom. We, in a sense, become like ticking time bombs, self abandoned, a walking question mark – educated in how to be governed instead of how to govern ourselves.

Another link in the chain that’s been individually holding us back is our attachment to the labels that we’ve accepted – being called this, that and the third, being laughed at and ignored as a nobody has alienated many of us to the limits of self-denial.

In this deprivation of self-knowledge, we’ve also accepted whatever paid psychologists have prescribed us, and have become dangerously addicted to the drug of our diagnosis. We search for gurus for guidance. We’ve allowed ourselves long enough to be coerced into accepting these elusive labels as our reality.

The desire to detach ourselves from the manacles of these conditions lays dormant in every human being aching to be free from this leash, and each of us drawn to distance ourselves to reflect, who when asked “why are you leaving?”, the answer is “to find myself”. The human is the only being alive to look for itself.

In the false principles of our education, the individualist anarchist Max Stirner prioritized in his teachings that the ultimate purpose of education isn’t simply the acquisition of knowledge, but to use the essence of it’s truths in a personal way – to become one with this sense of self, which opens to us deeper understandings behind the doorknob of self-discovery. He wrote – and mind you, the word ‘he’ that he uses can be replaced by any pronoun of choice – that “on the day when man regarded it as a point of honor that he should be alive to, or cognizant of self, acting for himself with complete autonomy, with full self consciousness, that that day he will begin to banish the ignorance that’s been holding him, her, or them back from embracing it’s power in an intimate way.”

With this knowledge, we find that we can direct a course of our lives with the consciousness that no indoctrinating school can coerce, that we can find our own guru within the guidance that we don’t have to accept society’s labels, or rely on accredited mental doctors to tell us who we psychologically are. We now become self-definers who take the step to look within to find relief from the chain of thought that’s been holding us back. No longer automatons, but autonomous: replacing medications with meditations. Educated, and tapping into the power of self-affirmation.

Abolitionists, as Harriet Tubman once said: “In my lifetime, I freed over 200 slaves: I could have freed over 200 more if only they knew they were slaves”.

Such knowledge serves as the key which, once internalized, unlocks unparalleled potential and the unmanacling of the mind.

Prompted by the recent arrest of beloved community member and organizer Hybachi LeMar, local anarchists, prison abolitionists, & friends took to the streets around Cook County Jail in early July to show solidarity with LeMar and all incarcerated people.

Fuck 12 anthems were blasted, pots, pans, and buckets were banged, the prison walls were redecorated with messages of solidarity, fireworks were set off, and chants of “free them all” were met with raised fists in cell windows, shouts, and dancing from inside. The small but energetic group of approximately 20 people was spotlighted and trailed by more than four cop cars and one prisoner transport van as the lively crew marched around the perimeter of the jail complex.

CCJ, the largest single site jail in ameriKKKa is responsible for the deaths of at least 7 people in the first two months of this year alone. Recently there have been reports of consistent flooding in cells, leaky plumbing, black mold, bug infestations, bad water, no soap, moldy and mice-bitten food, and an increased lack of privacy (view or listen to this full report, also In Contempt).

Chicago has been defunding mental health services in a big way since 2009. This has led to the funneling of thousands of people into emergency rooms and even more into the jail that also serves as the largest mental health provider in the state– and one of the largest in the country. Despite years of Sheriff Thomas Dart’s self-congratulatory claims of “reforming the broken criminal justice system” with a focus on crisis assessment and mental health screening, according to LeMar’s recent statement from Division 5, people inside are still reporting the “denial of mental health assistance despite requests, for detainees mentioning suicide to correctional staff”

LeMar was arrested in May while leaving the mutual aid distro that he has been holding down on the South Side for years. At the distro LeMar could be heard remarking “food for the body, food for the soul,” with a glimmer in his eyes while giving out free food and radical literature in the projects. He is currently being held at Cook County Jail with no bond and funds for his defense are in the negative.

Hybachi is a survivor of repeated state violence and is a thriving, loving, and giving community member. He could be sent out of state away from his family and community work. We need help making sure he gets out and he stays safe!