The Red Pill

The frailty of the human mind is rarely as clearly apparent as it is when one manages to gain some visibility into the insane amount of delusional material that it can pull over right in front of one's eyes so much that all of one's living reality becomes entirely subject to this huge and complex network of a man-created system conjured over an immeasurable span of time. The system we have in place to supposedly facilitate increase of individual comfort by mutual exchange of services via an utterly complex web of human subsystems interacting in mysterious ways is easily much more than this superb survival tactic picked up by the most advanced species known to-date. It is much more than a matter of convenience. The massive corpus of knowledge from innumerable schools of thought and the mind boggling multitudes of their implementation in the system are all pervading and enormously over-powering, so much so that, the mind itself is severely imprisoned in the system, and all the lines of demarcation beyond and beneath the veil of a conjured reality dissolve and vanish into the distant depths of a brain burdened with the weight of the knowledge of a system that is not key for its survival. The system dictates one's purpose, very lines of thought, principles and ideals for life, and the manner of one's day-to-day existence, and what feels real is the veil itself. The distinction between what a convenience construct is and what is more fundamental has vanished in most minds, and this is where you come to see how frail the mind is. It does not sound too much of an oversimplification to reduce the brain to an infrastructure which loads strange visions onto itself via mysterious interactions between the memory of stimuli from the past and exposure to the present and immediate accessible neighborhood, and comes to believe them with the kind of blind faith that is the archenemy of 'reason' or what we would like to mean when we utter the word 'rationality' without too much of a thought. It is not even remotely surprising that all popular human conceptions of 'the sum of all currently inexplicable' (God?) are modeled as this superpower with distinctly human attributes (if not in form and shape, definitely in qualities and nature) and worse, imbibed with attributes of the all pervading system that is merely a construct. The mind is happily trapped forever in its proud and enormously complex creation.

Taking the red pill is no joke, and what could possibly be the path to enlightenment does not really promise a happy journey to any. Had you envisioned the attainment of enlightenment as this deeply blissful feeling, you are most likely mistaken. Not only is the endeavour and the search for the truth beneath the system tedious, but also the emptiness and the lack of a purpose which results from the realization, leaves one in an endless state of numbness that is deeply painful, the kind of which only the pain of immortality could possibly match (also because when you are immortal, you inevitably look beyond the times and gradually beyond the system, and as a result eventually feel the same painful unceasing realization of the truth). When unplugged from the facade of the system, there is just this huge feeling of an enormous void, and you breathe a tiny pinch of the warped fabric into your lungs and let it pervade all of your inner self and soon you know you are no different from the void itself. All distinct sensations of the constructs fade away slowly, and when the feeling is in one of its ultimate heights, the experience is some kind of a no-feeling state that is independent of your location or the time of existence. This feeling sinks in for the first time and thereafter you forever fail to empathize with all the various happenings around you, directly correlated with the times of your life and dictated by all the various sub-systems in place at the very temporal and spatial location you happened to exist. You see all the folks doing all the various things everyday in search of meaning, joy or for just the plain matter of a living and you feel infinitely detached from the deeds and their drives, and at once, you see yourself placed at this enormous distance from all that you experience and once more there is the all-knowing sensation of the void filling your inner depths. If God was indeed characterised with human-like attributes, then this is probably how She would feel for a boundless span of time.

It is for this reason that, once unplugged from the system, it is not really as easy to let oneself back into the stream of the omnipresent system happily again. It might be easier if one could hypothetically, say, when in such a state, manage to end up in a peacefully empty infinite sleep, never to have to wake up and let oneself back into a system that could not feel real or meaningful anymore. In most cases however, the resulting condition is that of a confusion experienced by these men stuck in a state of limbo struggling every now and then to plug oneself back into the system and to try and feel the same sensation of taste that was once so happily felt. To their misery however, there is indeed no spoon and the 'residual self-image' is not as satisfying an experience anymore. The choice between truth and a false sense of hope or meaning is indeed possibly the trickiest ever, and if an unassuming all-knowing saintly Morpheus indeed stands before you with two pills on his hands, you better think twice before opting for the truth. For there is the alarmingly dangerous and likely possibility of getting stuck in the limbo forever. There would be no Trainman who'd ever come to your rescue, and the only choice before you would be that between an infinite sleep or an unwilling tolerance of a tasteless overpowering all-pervading false sense of a numbing reality.