You see, I thought I knew a lot. But it turned out that I was just a sponge saturated with Information. Our brain — a brilliant machine — tends to take stories that we never lived through and make them its own, thus creating an illusory feeling of fulfillment, of participation in whatever tale it absorbs.
I thought I knew a lot until a series of moments, conflicts, and trials mercilessly showed me myself as someone utterly confused, filled with tons of garbage, controlled by almost every system in existence, and absolutely helpless in the face of something just a bit more Real and greatly Unknown.
We live in a rickety tricky place. One could write a hundred books of ten thousand pages each and yet barely touch upon one billionth of lies and illusions that we start internalizing as the only “objective reality” since day one… But no, even before that :)
It starts long before our mother’s egg senses the father’s fittest sperm to make the new life spark happen and come into the physical existence. We are born under the watchful eye and total control of our organisms, genetics, central nervous systems, and of course of our elders, relatives, doctors, various methods of influence, and society as a whole. Human birth — the miracle of life — is not exactly alive anymore as it became a part of the System a long time ago.
I used to think that I knew a lot and that I was special. Then the world turned upside down and I wasn’t special or knowledgeable anymore. And then something else happened which made me realize that my story was a very common one, and it would most likely end with a usual demise.
People live, people get old, people die. Sometimes they die even before that, but the fact is most of us are destined to experience what we call a “normal death”, an unavoidable ending which just happens to everyone. It would be strange to hear that death as we know it is abnormal, don’t you think? I won’t say it then. I will simply repeat that my story is pretty common because it’s not enough to see — changes require action. If one wants something different, it’s not enough to take the Red Pill and passively watch the truths unfold. I suspect most advocates of passive awareness will disagree, but, well, this is not their story )
The ability to see more of real reality in the world of trickery, mind-control, and illusion — this is what most spiritual or “aware” people call Awakening. But this awakening in itself isn’t much of an achievement. It’s more like getting to the base of a staircase of a million steps and turns some of which are also illusions and traps. The “red pill” is like getting to that base, that’s all. Getting to the base of a staircase which appears where one could see nothing but a stone wall the moment before.
Seeing is not enough. Why so? It’s obvious. Imagine a sheep finds out that the farmer isn’t her friend; one day he’ll come around to slit her throat. She is awake to the fact that he can and will murder her. That’s a rude awakening indeed, but now what… Is this knowledge worth anything if the sheep chooses to remain on the farm?
Awareness is an invitation to make the first step, and that’s where most of us stop because that first step out of passive awakening feels like a step of a climber twenty meters below the top of Mount Everest without an oxygen mask.
It will sound crazy, but it’s very difficult to stay really ALIVE for longer stretches of time. They have created a system in which everyone is happy and comfortable in the process of slow, unavoidable dying. Existing in the mode of prolonged, unnoticeable dying is easy and often pleasant; when people realize what needs to be done to stop dying and start living (and keep doing it moment after moment since it’s an active process of Intent, it doesn’t just happen by itself), they don’t want to… It’s too hard. It’s too hard for us to actively defy dying because being alive has nothing to do with standard modes of what we call relaxing, chilling, killing time.
It might be that Personal Freedom doesn’t depend on having many rights and privileges (although those must be a given in a fair society). In the system that has normalized the process of dying, personal freedom has to do a lot with learning how to be truly alive. Children know it by nature, but we make every effort to make them forget so they can grow into perfectly normal, obedient, slowly dying adults. Many methods have been invented to make them forget, from family settings to social ethics, public education, and normalized system of “health care” in which many individuals are made dependent on “health professionals” and pharmaceutical products for life. The system which comes with so many rights and privileges of care, comfort, and things “for your own good”, also comes with one simple requirement to its citizens: stop being truly alive.
It’s time to gather all the strength and intent to make the first step. Standing at the bottom of a staircase and dreaming yourself awakened and free is definitely very satisfying, but many kinds of psychological and physical satisfaction are just a series of commonly used blocks in one chain of the many chains of the matrix of our world.