The 6 Grand Illusions That
Keep Us Enslaved To The Matrix
By Sigmund Fraud
“In prison, illusions can offer comfort.” – Nelson Mandela
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 magician’s 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.
Bansky, 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 you’re 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
For so many of us, following the law is considered a moral
obligation, and many of us gladly do so even though corruption, scandal, and
wickedness repeatedly demonstrate that the law is plenty flexible for those who
have the muscle to bend it. Police brutality and police criminality is rampant
in the US, the courts favor the wealthy, and we can longer even lead our lives
privately thanks to the intrusion of state surveillance. And all the while the
illegal and immoral Orwellian permanent war rages on in the background of life,
murdering and destroying whole nations and cultures. The social order is not
what it seems, for it is entirely predicated on conformity, obedience and
acquiescence which are enforced by fear of violence. History teaches us again
and again that the law is just as often as not used as an instrument of
oppression, social control and plunder, and any so-called authority in this
regard is false, hypocritical, and unjust. When the law itself does not follow
the law, there is no law, there is no order, and there is no justice. The pomp
and trappings of authority are merely a concealment of the truth that the
current world order is predicated on control, not consent.
2. The Illusion of Prosperity and Happiness
Adorning oneself in expensive clothes and trinkets, and
amassing collections of material possessions that would be the envy of any 19th
century monarch has become a substitute for genuine prosperity. Maintaining the
illusion of prosperity, though, is critical to our economy as it is, because
its foundation is built on consumption, fraud, credit and debt. The banking
system itself has been engineered from the top down to create unlimited wealth
for some while taxing the eternity out of the rest of us. True prosperity is a
vibrant environment and an abundance of health, happiness, love, and
relationships. As more people come to perceive material goods as the form of
self-identification in this culture, we slip farther and farther away from the
experience of true prosperity.
3. The Illusion of Choice and Freedom
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 today’s 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. Just look
no further than the phony institution of modern democracy to find a shining
example of false choices appearing real. Two entrenched, corrupt, archaic
political parties are paraded as the pride and hope of the nation, yet third
party and independent voices are intentionally blocked, ridiculed and plowed
under. The illusion of choice and freedom is a powerful oppressor because it
fools us into accepting chains and short leashes as though they were the
hallmarks of liberty.
Multiple choice is different than freedom, it is easy
servitude.
4. The Illusion of Truth
Truth has become a touchy subject in our culture, and we’ve
been programmed to believe that ‘the‘ truth comes from the demigods of media,
celebrity, and government. If the TV declares something to be true, then we are
heretics to believe otherwise. In order to maintain order, the powers that be
depend our acquiescence to their version of the truth. While independent
thinkers and journalists continually blow holes in the official versions of
reality, the illusion of truth is so very powerful that it takes a serious
personal upheaval to shun the cognitive dissonance needed to function in a
society that openly chases false realities.
5. The Illusion of Time
They say that time is money, but this is a lie. Time is your
life. Your life is an ever-evolving manifestation of the now. Looking beyond
the five sense world, where we have been trained to move in accordance with the
clock and the calendar, we find that the spirit is eternal, and that the each
individual soul is part of this eternity. The big deception here is the
reinforcement of the idea that the present moment is of little to no value,
that the past is something we cannot undo or ever forget, and that the future
is intrinsically more important than both the past and the present. This
carries our attention away from what it actually happening right now and
directs it toward the future. Once completely focused on what is to come rather
than what is, we are easy prey to advertisers and fear-pimps who muddy our
vision of the future with every possible worry and concern imaginable.
We are happiest when life doesn’t box us in, when
spontaneity and randomness gives us the chance to find out more about
ourselves. Forfeiting the present moment in order to fantasize about the future
is a trap. The immense, timeless moments of spiritual joy that are found in
quiet meditation are proof that time is a construct of the mind of humankind,
and not necessarily mandatory for the human experience. If time is money, then
life can be measured in dollars. When dollars are worth less, so is life. This
is total deception, because life is, in truth, absolutely priceless.
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.
Conclusion
The grand illusions mentioned here have been staged before
us as a campaign to encourage blind acquiescence to the machinations of the
matrix. In an attempt to dis-empower us, they demand our conformity and obedience,
but we must not forget that all of this is merely an elaborate sales pitch.
They can’t sell what we don’t care to buy.
Sigmund Fraud is a
survivor of modern psychiatry and a dedicated mental activist. He is a staff
writer for WakingTimes.com where he indulges in the possibility of a massive
shift towards a more psychologically aware future for mankind.
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