What’s Your Prob­lem, Man?

One of the main plot points in the movie series “The Matrix†is quite inter­est­ing. The movies posit that what peo­ple are see­ing is a total illu­sion.

In the Matrix, the illu­sion is done on a grand scale — humans are food, are con­fined to cylin­ders, and are drugged into think­ing they are actu­ally liv­ing in an appar­ently “real,†yet totally fab­ri­cated universe.

Mor­pheus, the guru to Neo, is sort of a guide cum men­tor cum mar­tial arts trainer. A human Yoda, as it were.

He offers Neo a choice:

I won­der if you, dear reader, can sense how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

I sus­pect that much of what I do as a ther­a­pist and Body­worker, and really, the way I attempt (and often fail) to live my life, has to do with escap­ing the straight-jacket of delu­sion. The delu­sion comes in many flavours, and has every­thing to do with think­ing. Ana­lyz­ing. Judging.

And, emphat­i­cally, it has to do with look­ing out­side of your­self for suc­cess, hap­pi­ness, ful­fill­ment, and approval. Or even more problematic—looking out­side of your­self for rescue.

The truth of the mat­ter is that all of us have been fed a line about what the world is about—about how the world works. This imag­i­nary dream-world was described in the Story of Indra’s Net, mil­len­nia ago. (I write about this story in my book, Half Asleep in the Bud­dha Hall.)

“Blue pill real­ity,†the story soci­ety teaches you, has been, and con­tin­ues to be, handed to you on a platter.

It’s the fan­tasy that the world is (for every­one but you) wired to pro­vide for your every desire, that oth­ers are sup­posed to do what you want them to, and that life is sup­posed to be (or make you) happy.

The kind of hap­pi­ness being sold is of the mate­ri­al­is­tic sort. It’s depen­dent happiness–if I have the right job, take the right course, have the right parents/spouse/kids, if I make the right amount of money, and live in the right town, in the right size house, then I’ll be happy.

Except that, even as some or all of those fan­tasies come true, all that hap­pens is that hap­pi­ness recedes, as new “demands on the uni­verse†occur to you.

In tan­dem with this “hap­pi­ness is every­thing†mantra runs it’s part­ner — grasping.

Because the stuff you want seems fleet­ing, you cling to what you have. Because some other stuff seems “yucky,†you end­lessly push it away, yet find your­self end­lessly pushing.

And the biggest grasp­ing of all is the belief that the way you think the world is, has any­thing to do with how the world is.

Now, it is the rare indi­vid­ual indeed, who does not sense (or feel) that some­thing about their pic­ture of the world isn’t quite right. Yet, when I per­haps sug­gest a “fix,†(such as med­i­ta­tion,) that’s when the excuses come out. Peo­ple are quite con­tent to stay stuck in the Matrix, des­per­ately doing what they can to ignore the pain of know­ing something’s amiss.

That’s the splin­ter in the mind part of the above quote.

It’s the nig­gling, pok­ing, irri­tat­ing “know­ing†that some­thing about this pic­ture is haywire—that some­thing about what we’ve built out there, the way we live, the way we relate, the way we make a liv­ing, that all of it is some­how “half a bub­ble off plumb.â€

In the mid­dle of the 19^th cen­tury, the exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­pher Kierkegaard first described this splin­ter as Angst. More than anx­i­ety, Angst is a deep seated and pro­found despair and inse­cu­rity. In a sense, the baubles and allures of mod­ern life are sold to us as a dis­trac­tion from this Angst–dri­ven splin­ter of suspicion.

The path we sug­gest is free­dom. It is not free­dom from. It is, sym­bol­i­cally, pop­ping the red pill.

I tend to frame this from a Zen per­spec­tive. I do this because I am con­tin­u­ally amazed at the insights of Sid­dhartha, so many cen­turies ago, as he saw through the illu­sion and delu­sion of liv­ing life from a per­spec­tive of dual­ism. He iden­ti­fied the essence of life—clear, unen­cum­bered, lib­er­ated understanding.

He freed him­self from the paral­y­sis of analy­sis, stopped over think­ing, and began to live.

He saw through the delu­sions that sur­rounded him, dropped the end­less search for hap­pi­ness, and found Nir­vana (peace.)

Here’s a hint: if this splin­ter anal­ogy makes sense to you, if you “get†that some­thing is wrong with the tra­di­tional pic­ture of who you are and how the world works, then—wait for it—you must step out, com­pletely, from the faulty pic­ture, and embrace another way.

Half mea­sures do not work.

Dab­bling at med­i­ta­tion, try­ing a com­mu­ni­ca­tion model, exper­i­ment­ing with Qi Gong, test­ing out a ther­apy, or timidly approach­ing Body­work— all are ways to stay deeply caught in the Matrix, while lying to your­self that you are actu­ally accom­plish­ing something.

Half mea­sures do not work, and are actu­ally a part of stay­ing deeply stuck.

But, but…

But noth­ing. The splin­ter feel­ing is there, for all of us, because the com­mon, “blue pill†ver­sion of the world sim­ply does not hold. The cos­mos is not a celes­tial candy store, just filled with good­ies for you to “man­i­fest.†It’s not up to oth­ers to do what you want them to. It’s not about who you know, where you work, or even what you create—if you think any of that stuff will last, dream on, dream on.

The only way out is 100% com­mit­ment to remov­ing the straight-jacket of delu­sion by tak­ing 100% respon­si­bil­ity for your­self, and 0% respon­si­bil­ity for cor­rect­ing, direct­ing, or demand­ing any­thing of another.

So, what’s really the point of it all? Com­ing into full self-awareness, which in a sense means see­ing through the games. It’s accept­ing that you are the cre­ator of every iota of your real­ity, and you do so by and through your judge­ments, attrac­tions, and aver­sions. Once you see that the world you have is the one you are mak­ing, you can ease up, drop the judge­ments and inter­pre­ta­tions, and open your­self to the path of sim­ply and fully being.

What I mean is, you begin to immerse your­self in the expe­ri­ence of liv­ing your life, with full atten­tion, absolute ded­i­ca­tion, and no invest­ment in outcome.

Can this be done? Of course. Moment by moment. It looks like active atten­tive­ness, with­out desire for life, sit­u­a­tions, peo­ple, or “what’s hap­pen­ing†to be any dif­fer­ent than it is. This is not sur­ren­der or not car­ing. Because of this focus, you may tire­lessly invest your time and energy into any­thing. But you will do so from a full com­mit­ment per­spec­tive, not from “Some­body should do some­thing about this!â€

Here’s how it appears:

This is life lived with­out games, illu­sion, or restriction.

It’s liv­ing life full bore, expe­ri­enc­ing it all, not hold­ing back, block­ing your­self, depriv­ing your­self of expe­ri­ence for propriety’s sake. It’s a com­mit­ment to move heaven and earth so that oth­ers might awaken too, but with­out get­ting your ego involved in whether oth­ers choose to join you or not. (This would be one I deal with all the time, some­times ele­gantly, some­times not so much.)

If this kind of liv­ing, this kind of free­dom appeals to you, stay tuned! I’ll be talk­ing about the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of this in the weeks to come.

In the mean time, take the red pill!

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