I was watching on Netflix, yesterday night, the serie called Brave New World, adapted from Aldous Huxley's novel to fit the concerns of our time. In it the people of New London frequently ingest a pill called 'soma' that essentially keeps them “asleep”, cut off from their humanity, makes them malleable and obedient to the 'System'. The underlying message of the serie is considered by this writer as undeniably truthful and useful.
A person who works to deepen and expand his awareness inevitably begins to sense the truth of how we are kept asleep at one point on his journey. There is a point in which he starts seeing it in others, and then there is a point in which he starts seeing it in himself. Slavery to routines, systems, ideas, estrangement from sensations and feelings through emotion-mongering and strong pleasures etc.
Back to my living room...at that moment, on becoming aware of how we are domesticated, comforted, buffered away from reality, truth, and the raw Present, I also became aware that I had watched countless episodes of various series on Netflix during the day.
Resting comfortably on my sofa, entertaining myself by watching a serie depicting the grave illness of our time, I came upon the awareness that truth is being sterilised through information. In other words, and perhaps more precisely, we are being vaccinated against truth. How is this happening? Let's attempt to detangle the process.
First: The very thing that is informing you that you are being manipulated is a form of manipulation. What's more is that it is exactly the same form of manipulation it is informing you about. It is vital to see and understand this because everything follows from it.
It is a true vaccination, not in a metaphorical sense. We are being injected with the idea of truth and ideas that correspond to truth, and this, whether consciously intended or not, insulates us from the necessity of finding out the truth. Further, even if by some strange attack of curiosity, the vaccinated mind embarks on a quest of discovery, the difficulty arises because that mind cannot hold the truth. The vaccination makes sure that the truth is immediately processed and turned into an idea, a new asset in the 'collection'. In short the vaccine makes sure we live in a 'reality' of thought forms.
This is accomplished because we are “learning the truth” in the same moment and within the same activity that we are being subjected to the manipulation of which it speaks. A relatively new systemic sophistication. It is like some kind of clever, artsy joke in which the form and content simultaneously support and contradict each other.
But it is not a joke. The 'system' has not only learnt how to forge reality, but has also created a powerful and insidious distribution-network for its fakes. The system that was born to help us navigate reality is now seeking to replace it.
How is this accomplished, in very practical terms?
We are being given a small, limited, and synthetic version of truth, and this so that our need to know is satisfied before we reach a place of knowing. In other words we are being led into thinking that we know through the commodification of ideas that resemble and even depict the truth.
The idea of the pill is the pill, for in that moment of being-manipulated, the mind thinks that it has understood. The pill gets stuck in its own metaphor; visual reference and the image's location within a system of ideas becomes 'understanding'. The information highway has the power to alienate us from the path of knowledge. The information highway is about speed, volume, images and ideas. The path of knowledge is about sensitivity, subtle vibration, and agile stillness. In the information highway one consumes all sorts of things. Knowing is the fire that consumes us from within.
In fact here, awareness makes all the difference. The duplicity of deceit stops with awareness.
Knowing is an action. It is not a thing of the mind, even though the intellectual faculty is frequently involved in some way. True knowing can be described as a state of being, and for as long as we think we understand something simply by alloting to it an image or a string of words, then this knowing is going to remain inaccessible to us. The vaccination against truth makes sure that this remains the case.
The mind as we know it is always in conflict with itself. This is the trap of binary reason. Every opinion is a limited view of reality, and thus inevitably generates another view, which is also limited. In the absence of an interface between two limited and incongruent opinions, the only thing that remains is conflict. Conflict than generates multitudes of other limited and conflicting views of reality. This happens until the truth about reality is completely lost underneath tons of intellectual and emotional debris. In fact the action of knowing is precisely the discovery of that interface. When one enters the Silence, opinions are immediately revealed for what they are: fragments inhabiting a two dimensional reality. What this means is that they are each a window to truth in some way, but each of them can only see the other windows as one-dimensional lines. This is the impasse of reason.
As soon as one enters the Silence, the Presence, a flat “reality” bends on itself, becomes Real. Things inhabiting it can now see each other. This is because now there is space, were before there was only flatness. The beautiful paradox (it is only a paradox for our intellectually conditioned minds) is that knowing begins and ends with silence.
Knowing is a state of being-aware, of feeling reality as vibration, and being-here for it in one's totality.
Active awareness disallows the potentially infinite multiplication of decoys in which a less alert mind will inevitably get caught. The system has learnt that the postmodern human mind finds it exceedingly difficult to make the difference between the thing and the thought that refers to the thing. In fact postmodern philosophy tries to make the point that language and thought are self-enclosed systems, infinitely multiplying within themselves, in the process artificially 'forming' a fundamentally chaotic and insubstantial 'reality'. This thinking is a symptom of the very illusion this philosophical tradition points out.
Awareness puts an end to the inner counterpart of this process which might be described as “the duplication of reality and truth into ideas about reality and truth”. What this means is that an inner awareness, a living and burning alertness of the observed present moment, cuts through the screen of simulations that the system feeds us as 'reality'.
Awareness neutralizes the vaccine.
Postscriptum:
In our day and age we hear may 'interesting' concepts. Simulation Theory is one such concept. In a nutshell Simulation Theory argues that reality is a simulation. Vaccines work!
Some months ago I was watching a movie by one of my favourite bands, Muse. The movie is named after their album Simulation Theory. Halfway through the movie I became ill with a kind of flu. A message of the body's intelligence. I have not listened to any recent work by Muse since, and never will. The virus hides within the cells of information.
True understanding is Active Awareness. May we have it at all times.
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