The 6 Grand Illusions That Keep Us Enslaved to the Matrix
For a magician to fool his audience his deceit must go unseen, and to this end he crafts an illusion to avert attention from reality. While the audience is entranced, the deceptive act is committed, and for the fool, reality then becomes inexplicably built upon on a lie. That is, until the fool wakes up and recognizes the truth in the fact that he has been duped.
Maintaining the suspension of disbelief in the illusion, however, is often more comforting than acknowledging the magicians secrets.
We live in a world of illusion. So many of the concerns that occupy the mind and the tasks that fill the calendar arise from planted impulses to become someone or something that we are not. This is no accident. As we are indoctrinated into this authoritarian-corporate-consumer culture that now dominates the human race, we are trained that certain aspects of our society are untouchable truths, and that particular ways of being and behaving are preferred.
Psychopaths disempower people in this way. They blind us with never ceasing barrages of suggestions and absolutes that are aimed at shattering self-confidence and confidence in the future.
Banksy, the revered and elusive revolutionary street artist, once commented:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply youre not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. Banksy
Advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. When we look further we see that the overall organization of life is centered around the pursuit of illusions and automatic obedience to institutions and ideas which are not at all what they seem. We are in a very real sense enslaved. Many call this somewhat intangible feeling of oppression the matrix, a system of total control that invades the mind, programming individuals to pattern themselves in accordance with a mainstream conformist version of reality, no matter how wicked it gets.
The grandest of the illusions which keep us enslaved to the matrix, the ones that have so many of us still entranced, are outlined below for your consideration.
1. The Illusion of Law, Order and Authority.............. and the rest of the story at link
http://www.activistpost.com/2015/02/the-6-grand-illusions-that-keep-us.html
TooPragmatic
(50 posts)"A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphismsin short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins"
Nietzsche: On Truth And Lies In A Nonmoral Sense
We all need lies to cope with the existence we call life. Those who do not lie, can be found in certain institutions or six feet under. This text, for all its noble intentions, only wants you to replace one lie for another. To accuse others for these lies is to reflect the blame from yourselves. We crave lies to give ourselves meaning in our short existence in time. Time, a traveler that marches trough life. We are mere companions, not knowing where it came from and not know where it's going. We create the web of lies around it and some stick and some wear off. But ultimately we can only get rid of one lie by covering it up with another. Because facing The Truth will only lead us lose our minds. But you can comfort yourself by shrugging this off as another lie.
Sorry, feeling like doing a bit of demolition work today. Governments can be crappy as elites in general. People need to shake the walls to keep them aware how fragile their houses are. When political parties become fixed and voters stop caring, life gets easy for the elites. Just remember not to buy in to your own propaganda when you are shaking the walls. You might brake the entire house.
Manifest Destiny
(139 posts)Great stuff.
Manifest Destiny
(139 posts)that relates very well to your subject at hand. Thanks for the article!
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)You might enjoy the David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurt
dialogues.
David Bohm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm
Jiddu Krishnamurti
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiddu_Krishnamurti
Thought is conditioning. We are deeply conditioned and generally unaware of this conditioning. This conditioning permeates all our thought, emotion, and actions and creates immense confusion and incoherence. The lack of attention to this conditioning is what prevents it from being cleared up.
It is imperative, absolutely essential for the future of humanity that we are concerned with the brain which is conditioned. If one is aware of that, then we can proceed to ask whether it is possible to free the brain.
Jiddu Krishnamurti (Source: Mind Without Measure Talks in New Delhi 1st Public Talk 30th October, 1982 `The Root Cause of Confusion)
When we start to perceive this conditioning, this incoherence, we externalize it and do not see thoughts role in creating it. Thought melds with perception and this melded end product is seen to be perception but not thought. Its a mess, and no action from this mess will clear it up. We need to stop and give attention to what is actually happening.
Our confusion then multiplies because we use thought to attempt to solve the difficulties it has created:
thought has developed traditionally in a way such that it claims not to be affecting anything but just telling you the way things are. Therefore people cannot see that they are creating a problem and then apparently trying to solve it. Lets take a problem what problem do you like? Pollution? Ecology is not in itself a problem. It works perfectly well by itself. It becomes a problem because we are thinking a certain way, by breaking things up, and each person is doing his own thing. Therefore the ecological problem is due to the way we think. Thought thinks pollution is a problem out there and it must solve it. Now that doesnt make sense because simultaneously thought is creating all the activities which make the problem in the first place and then creates another set of activities to try to overcome it. Thought doesnt stop doing the things that are making the ecological problem, or the national problem, or whatever the problem is.
David Bohm (Source: On Creativity: 1996)
The grievances held by activists are all grievances about unintelligence or in different words grievances about when the incoherence of thought and knowledge dominates. Which is really to say we are talking about thought that is not proprioceptive. The activist is equally caught up in this incoherence, as I was and still am. Thus the problem is not bad guys, corrupt governments, or evil corporations, but rather it is the activity of thought. And this activity that is going astray, that has a systemic fault, is operating inside each one of us. We can no longer externalize this problem, which is not to say we ignore heinous acts from distorted individuals or groups.
The real crisis is not these events which are confronting us, like wars and crime and drugs and economic chaos and pollution; its really in thought which is making it all the time. Each person can do something about that thought, because hes in it. But one of the troubles we get into is to say, Its they who are thinking all that, and I am thinking right. I say thats a mistake. I say thought pervades us. Its similar to a virus somehow this is a disease of thought, of knowledge, of information, spreading all over the world. The more computers, radio, and television we have, the faster it spreads. So the kind of thought thats going on all around us begins to take over in every one of us, without our even noticing it. Its spreading like a virus and each one of us is nourishing that virus.
David Bohm (Source: On Dialogue, 1996)
And as David Bohm rightfully pointed out, its not accurate to view these difficulties as problems. We are used to dealing with practical and technical problems and there thought has a place. Such thinking we then apply to the human problems like division, greed, nationalism, exploitation, etc., where this thinking in terms of problems does not apply. With a practical problem like how to build a better bridge we can compare against past knowledge and experiment until we find a better way and then plan, implement, and test that new way. But with something like two groups of people at odds with each other because they believe in different things, that division is constantly being generated by the activity of thought. One cannot then use thought to plan their way out of thought. Like the example of the ecological problem referenced earlier, the only solution is the cessation of the incoherent activity of thought building a false structure it then defends absolutely. A problem is a problem when you can do something about it. A false structure, a persistently false appearance, you can have no interaction with except for seeing through it, that is, seeing the false as false. This cessation of thought is not brought about by more thought but rather by attention to the processes and activities of thought itself. A deep sensitivity to the process of thought, and not just its content, is what is being called for.
In regards to planning David Bohm noted:
I think therefore the attempt to make a plan to change society is not going to work, because society is the result of what it means to us, and the plan will not change what it means.
And:
This point is crucially significant for understand psychological and social change. For if meaning is something separate from human reality, then any change must be produced by an act of will or choice, guided perhaps by our new perception of meaning. But if meaning itself is a key part of reality, then, once society, the individual and their relationship are seen to mean something different from what they did before, a fundamental change has already taken place. So social change requires a different, socially accepted meaning, such as in the change from feudalism to the forms that followed it, or from autocracy to democracy, or to communism, and so on. According to the meanings accepted, the entire society went.
David Bohm (Source for the above two quotes: Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue: 1985)
This brings us to yet another subtle point. If we cannot plan our way out; if we cannot rely on a series of steps in a succession of time, then what is the way out? Just now it was touched on a change in meaning but then the question becomes how does one change meaning, and again it will be a matter of perception and not thought or will.
What it comes down to is we really need to understand thought. Not understand thought as an idea or concept but to through direct observation of its activity. That observation is without conclusion or image. This is arduous. One must take interest in every moment, and trace the movements of every thought. As David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti pointed out endlessly, thought is doing all kinds of things that we arent aware of. So then we need to be aware of thoughts activities. And when the word thought is being used here it means so many things. Thought runs wide and deep and is not separate from feeling and emotion nor is it separate from the whole of knowledge of human kind and every symbolic and physical thing we have produced. Everything depends on understanding the ways of our thinking.
If Im right in saying that thought is the ultimate origin or source [of humanitys difficulties], it follows that if we dont do anything about thought, we wont get anywhere. We may momentarily relieve the population problem, the ecological problem, and so on, but they will come back in another way. So Im saying what we have got to examine this question of thought.
David Bohm (Source: Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political, and Environmental Crises Facing our World: 1991)
No one is denying that thought has a place but we have grievously misunderstood the limitations of thought and how small its place is. Thought is at the source of our difficulties. The way we attempt to solve our difficulties is the difficulty because we use thought. We take thought for granted in everything we do. It underlies everything we do but we never attend to its activities. Then thought tells us its faithfully reporting reality back to us and we dont question this. If thought is at the source of our difficulties then employing more thought is not the way out. We need to understand what is actually taking place.
When we speak of thought we are speaking of time also. Time is needed to carry out the intentions of thought. A separation is implied when we invoke time: there is the present state, and some future state, and time and space in-between the two. Time means time to become something different than what we are now. Yet what we are now is the only thing that is real and the other is a fictional projection of thought. When we speak of time we are also denying any kind of immediate understanding or immediate perception. If one could not view things in terms of time then the only possible understanding or action that could take place would have to be derived from what is seen in the present moment. Action then would be inseparable from perception.
To provide some further clarification on this issue of time, consider this analogy employed by Bohm:
Imagine a stream which is being polluted near the source. The people downstream dont know about that, so they start removing bits of pollution, trying to purify the water, but perhaps introducing more pollution of another kind as they do so. What has to be done, therefore, is to see this whole stream, and get to the source of it. Somewhere, at the source of thought, it is being polluted that is the suggestion. Pollution is being diverted into the stream, and this is happening all the time. You could say, in one sense, the wrong step was when people first started pouring pollution in. But the fact that we have kept on pouring it in is the main point its pouring in all the time. Therefore, the source is not in time not back in ancient times, when it may have started but rather the source is always now. Thats what we have to look into.
David Bohm (Source: On Dialogue, 1996)
Activism in its current form always implicitly endorses both thought and time, which are not separate, in its approach to solving a problem. Solving a problem of course implies having a notion of some end state in mind. The confusion stems from the fact that time and thought can be appropriately used to address practical and technical problems. The human problems are rooted in thought and memory forming a center that is the self. This centre is not apart from thought. As Krishnamurti would say, there is only (conditioned) thought there is no thinker. Outwardly, technically and practically, there is a separation between subject and object that allowed time to be a convenient way of viewing things. But inwardly, for the human problems, for selfishness, greed, divisiveness, exploitation, fear, anger, and all those other things that are at the root of the crises we create, there is no time and space between the person and their incoherence. Again to quote Krishnamurti, the observer is the observed. Our human problems are all of this quality that there is not separation between the observer and the observed, which means no time, but this is not seen.
In response to the question of why the self, ego, or I is a false appearance and is fragmentary, Bohm and Krishnamurti stated:
Krishnamurti: Because it [the self] has separated itself from the thing it has created.
David Bohm: Thats the point, so lets make that very clear. It has attributed to itself a center which is separate from itself, where in fact it has created the center and it is centre.
Krishnamurti: It is the centre.
David Bohm: But it attributes to that centre the property of being alive and real, and so on. And that is a fragmentation.
Krishnamurti: That is the basic thing.
David Bohm: From there follows the necessity for the rest of the fragmentation of life. Because in order to maintain that those two are different, thought must then break up everything to fit that. And there enters the confusion, because either it separate things that are not separate, or puts together things that are different. In order to maintain the fiction that the centre is separate from thought, everything else had to be made to fit that.
(Source: The Limits of Thought: 1999)
And Krishnamurti stated:
When there is the realization the activity has always been from the centre, and the centre cannot possibly reach the other goal, the other side, other dimension, whatever you like to call it, across the river, it says, All right, finished So I have come to that point when I realize completely, when the mind realizes completely there is nothing you can do. All movement of thought has come to an end. Because thought said, Ill get there, I must do this, I must investigate, I must etc., etc., and suddenly it realizes, By Jove Have I reached that point when I can do nothing? That means psychologically, nothing. You understand what that means? Not a thing. That means, no activity of thought. If Ive come to that point, actually, Ive got it, its finished!
(Source: Sixth Seminar Meeting at Brockwood Park: September 1979)
Back to the subject of time:
Self-knowledge is important, but if I take time to understand myself, I will understand myself eventually by examination, analysis, by watching my whole relationship with others and so on all that involves time. And I say there is another way of looking at the whole thing without time. Which is, when the observer is the observed. In that observation there is no time.
Jiddu Krishnamurti (Source: 1st Conversation with David Bohm Brockwood Park June 11, 1983)
And since the future of mankind depends on the psyche [self, centre] it seems then that the future of mankind is not going to be determined through actions in time.
David Bohm (Source: Second Conversation With David Bohm at Brockwood Park June 20, 1983)
So then what Bohm and Krishnamurti are pointing to is action not based on time. An action not based on thought. Something apart from thought and knowledge. This is absolutely crucial because almost everyone has been assuming that time and thought will get us out of our difficulties but now someone else has come along and proposed time and thought are what have created our difficulties. They call for something else altogether, something beyond time, thought, and knowledge, to meet the challenge. The knowledge we hold is not the factor that will get us out of the present mess we are in. Until we see this we will act from that knowledge and continue to get results we dont intend.
You dont have to become an activist, which again is a fragmentation of life. If we are really concerned with total action, not a fragmentary one, then total action comes with total attention, which is to see actually `what is both inwardly and outwardly. And that very seeing is the doing.
Jiddu Krishnamurti (Source: Beginnings of Learning Part I Chapter 15 School Dialogue Brockwood Park: May 25, 1973)
What then should we do? What then is called for? Activism is not separate from life. Activism is a by-product of perceiving thought deeply. One cannot limit their motivation to understand what is in front of them to the confines of activism. What is being called for is proprioception of thought. So what is proprioception and proprioception of thought? Bohm provides the following clarification:
But in fact you can get evidence that thoughts and feelings move as a processes on their own; they are not being run by me. They are not being produced by the me, and they are not being experienced by the me.
There is, however, some self-reference built into this whole system. There is what is called proprioception, or self-perception. Physically, a person is aware immediately that he has moved a part of his body. If some outside force suddenly moved your arm, you could tell that that is different from having moved it yourself. The nerves are built so as to be able to know that. So there is proprioception in the body the distinction between actions which originate in the body, and those which originate outside, is perceived as a functional difference. In this light, the notion that there is a self as a kind of centre, in the body as a centre of activity, is natural. Animals obviously have it too, and they can make that distinction. We can therefore say that this notion of I cannot be entirely wrong, or it probably would never have arisen.
The question is: how does this natural, useful distinction turn into the contrdictions of the ego? Something that was correct and useful has somehow developed in way which has gone wrong. Thought lacks proprioception, and we have got to learn, somehow, to observe thought. In the case of observing the body, you can tell that observation is somehow taking place even when there is no sense of a distinct observer.
Is it possible for thought similarly to observe itself, to see what it is doing, perhaps by awakening some other sense of what thought is, possibly through attention? In that way, thought may become proprioceptive. It will know what it is doing and it will not create a mess.
(Source: On Dialogue, 1996)
In this vain my favorite expression on this subject of proprioception of thought was a brief passage by Krishnamurti:
Thought shattering itself against its own nothingness is the explosion of meditation.
(Source: Krishnamurtis Notebook: Page 166)
livetohike
(22,145 posts)Manifest Destiny
(139 posts)Saving this to favorites as there is so much to green from it . Thanks.
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)longship
(40,416 posts)The mobile user interface is utterly useless, plus it's packed with ads which break the narrative into tiny chunks, and by the way, viewed through an annoying aperture. And of course it begins with an unasked for pop-up.
Not worth the trouble.
canoeist52
(2,282 posts)"6. The Illusion of Separateness
On a strategic level, the tactic of divide and conquer is standard operating procedure for authoritarians and invading armies, but the illusion of separateness runs even deeper than this.
We are programmed to believe that as individuals we are in competition with everyone and everything around us, including our neighbors and even mother nature. Us vs. them to the extreme. This flatly denies the truth that life on this planet is infinitely inter-connected. Without clean air, clean water, healthy soil, and a vibrant global sense of community we cannot survive here.
While the illusion of separateness comforts us by gratifying the ego and and offering a sense of control, in reality it only serves to enslave and isolate us."
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)I thought too
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)Since it is all an illusion for which the OP, alone, has the key.
Javaman
(62,530 posts)we are "corporate serfs" working under "corporate colonization".
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)I read the piece ... with a rising sense of dis-ease; until I got here:
Read between the lines and look at the fine print, we are not free, not by any intelligent standard. Freedom is about having choice, yet in todays world, choice has come to mean a selection between available options, always from within the confines of a corrupt legal and taxation system and within the boundaries of culturally accepted and enforced norms.
And, here:
Then, it became clear ...first, when has "Choice", not meant "a selection between available options"?
And, isn't our being "forced" into "culturally accepted and enforced norms" the thing that creates the sense of community?
Maybe, I just did smoke enough; but, the piece should have started with:
I'm sorry Virginia ... there really is NO Santa Claus.
Response to Ichingcarpenter (Original post)
Manifest Destiny This message was self-deleted by its author.