The Seven Pillars of the Matrix

I am not this hair, I am not this skin, I am the soul that lives within. Rumi As Goethe put it, No one is more of a slave than he who thinks himself free without being so.

Contemporary baptized, corporatized and sanitized man rarely has the occasion to question his identity, and when he does, a typical response might be, I am a Christian, American, Product Manager for a large retail chain, heterosexual, graduate of a such and such high school and university, married to Betty, father of Johnny, and buddies with Mike and Joe. His answer implies not only beliefs about himself, but many responsibilities, rules, restrictions and punishments for transgressions. Few if any of these were ever negotiated, on the contrary, they were imposed upon said individual, yet if asked, will inevitably respond that he is free, and if from the United States, would add that he is fortunate to be born in the home of the free and is the product of an exceptional nation based on freedom. Is freedom the right word to use for this man, or would modern domesticated simian be a better description? He has been told what to do, believe think, feel, since he can remember. A very clever rancher has bred billions of these creatures around the globe and created the most profitable livestock imaginable. They work for him, fight for him, die for him, believe his wildest tales, laugh at his jokes and rarely get out of line. When domesticated man does break one of the rules, there are armies, jailers, and bureaucrats prepared to kill, incarcerate or hound the transgressor into submission. One of the most fascinating aspects to domesticated mans predicament is that he never looks at the cattle, sheep, pigs etc. that are raised to be eaten and make the very simple connection that he just another beast of burden corralled and shepherded through his entire life. How is this accomplished? One of the keys to it is found in the very methods that make other domesticated animals vulnerable to domestication. Only animals that naturally live in hierarchical groups can be dominated by man. The trick is to fool the animal into believing that the leader of the pack, or herd, is the man who is domesticating him. Once this is accomplished, the animal is under full control of his homo sapiens master. The domesticated homo sapien is no different, originally organized in groups of with a maximum size of 150 with a clear hierarchy, it was easy to replace the leader of these smaller groups with one overarching figure, God, the King, the President, CEO etc. All one has to do is turn on a TV or a computer to be reminded who the boss is. The method for creating this exceptionally loyal and obedient modern breed of, homo domesticus, can be described as having seven pillars, upon which a immense matrix captures the talking simians and their conscious minds and hooks them in a complex mesh from which few ever escape. The system is so advanced, that those who do untangle themselves and cut their way out of the net are immediately branded as mentally ill, anti-social, terrorists, or simply losers who cant accept the complexity of modern life, i.e., conspiracy nuts.

Plato described this brilliantly in his Allegory of the Cave, where people only see man made shadows of objects, institutions, Gods and ideas. When any of them is liberated and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn around and walk and look toward the light, he will suffer sharp pains. The glare will hurt him and he will be unable to see the realities of which, in his former state, he has only seen the shadows. Then imagine someone says to him what he saw before was an illusion; but now, when he is approaching nearer to reality and his eye is turned toward more real existence, he has a clearer vision. It began with the word, which forever changed the ability of men to manipulate each other. Every sensation was directly felt through the senses without the filter of words. But once this began to occur, somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the first stones were put in place for the creation of the Matrix. As soon as the words began to flow, the world was split, and in that fracturing was born mans angst and slavery. The words separated us from who we really were, creating the first screen onto which those images from Platos cave were cast. Gurdjieff said it well, Identifying is the chief obstacle to self-remembering. A man who identifies with anything is unable to remember himself.

It is no accident that in Hesiods ages of man, the Golden Age knew no agriculture, which appeared in the Silver age, and by the time we reach the Bronze age the dominant theme is toil and strife. The two key elements to the enslavement of man were clearly language and agriculture. In the hunter gatherer society, taking out the boss was no more complicated than landing a fastball to the temple. Only since the the advent of farming was the possibility of creating full time enforcers and propagandists made possible, and hence enslavement inevitable. The search for enlightenment rarely if ever finds fruits in those temples to words, our schools and universities, or the corporations they prepare students to serve. Almost all traditions point to isolation and silence as the only path to awakening and antidote to modern slavery. Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god. Aristotle So with the institution from which we are mercilessly bombarded with words and deprived of peace and solitude, we will begin our survey of the keys to the Matrix.

Education
There are things we are born able to do like laughing and crying and others we pick up without much of an effort like walking, speaking and fighting, but without strict institutional indoctrination, there is no way that were can ever become a functioning technocrat of Matrix. We must be indoctrinated, sent to Matrix boot camp, which of course is school. How else could you take a hunter and turn him into a corporate slave, submissive to clocks, countless bosses, monotony and uniformity?

Children naturally know who they are, they have no existential angst regarding their identities, but schools immediately begin driving home the point of who they are, which inevitably leads the students to the concept of who they arent. We drill the little ones until the learn to count money, tell time, measure progress with graphs, stand in line, keep silent and endure submission. It cant be stressed enough how much education is simply inculcating people with the clock and they idea of a forced identity. What child when he goes to school isnt a little taken back to hear himself referred to by his full name. Its not as if language itself is sufficiently abstract. Nothing must be left without a category, a name and one more level of abstraction. Susy cant just be Susy, she is a citizen of a city, a county, a state, a country and a civilization, many of which have flags, mascots, armies, uniforms, currencies and languages. Once all the mascots, tag lines and corporate creeds are learned, then history can begin to be taught. The great epic myths invented and conveniently woven into the archetypes which have come down through the ages cement the new structure into the childs mind. Even the language that she speaks without effort must be deconstructed for her. An apple will never again be just an apple, it will become a noun, a subject, or an object. Nothing will be left untouched, all must be ripped apart and explained back to the child in Matrix-ese. We are taught almost nothing useful during the twelve or so years that we institutionalized and conditioned for slavery- not how to cook, farm, hunt, build, gather, laugh or play. We are only taught institutionalized games and behaviors that make for solid careers as slavocrats.

Government
In the countries that claim to be democratic the concept of a government created to serve the people is often espoused- the same thing could be claimed of a cruise missile. Government, and the laws they create and enforce institutionalize social control for the benefit of those who have seized power. This has always been the case and always will be. Pre-democracy it was much clearer who had power, but the genius of massive democratic states is the layers upon layers of corporatacracy and special interests brilliantly conceal the identify of those who manage the massive apparatus of control. The functions of the state are so well esconded in dogmatic versions of history taught in schools that almost no one questions why we need anything beyond the bare essentials of local government beyond the local communities we live in. The history classes in school never point the finger at the governments themselves as the propagators and instigators of war, genocide, starvation and corruption. Those acts are always carried out by bad men and their goon squads, and they must be defeated by the valiant governments who fight for democracysomething right out of Disney.

Patriotism
This is one is a key elements to for the masters of the matrix. Patriotism is always focused on a pure abstraction, something that if not conceived of by them, would never exist. In places like the United States it reaches levels of absurdity unequaled in the world. Americans are taught, with the exception of one powerful special interest group, that they should value their compatriots above and beyond those of their own ethnic background, race or religion. The more organic bonds are to be shed in favor of the great corporate state. From infancy, children are indoctrinated like Pavlovs dogs to worship the paraphernalia of the state and see it as a mystical, demi God.

Religion
Religion comes from the Latin re-ligare and it means to reconnect. But reconnect to what? The question before all religions is what have we been disconnected from. The indoctrination and alienation of becoming a card carrying slave has a cost; the level of abstraction and the disconnect from any semblance of humanity converts people in nihilistic robots. No amount of The patriotic fervor gives them only a momentary reprieve and has no lasting psychological or spiritual value. The original spiritual connection man had with the universe began to dissolve into duality with the onset of language, and by the time cities and standing armies arrived, man was in need of a reconnection, hence we get our faith based religions. Faith in the religious experiences of sages, as William James put it. Of course the liturgies of our mainstream religions offer some solace, some connection, but in general they simply supply the glue for the Matrix. If we focus on the Abrahamic religions, we have a god, much like the state, who needs to be loved. He is also jealous of the other non-existent gods, and he is as sociopathic as the governments he works for. He wipes them out with floods while the governments wipe them out with wars, cultural revolutions, and atom bombs.

Circus
The sad thing about circus is that its generally not even entertaining. The slaves are told it is time for some fun, and the move in hordes to their electrical devices and observe, imagining that what they are seeing is of some value when in general it is nothing more that mind control and reinforcements of the patriotic, religious and educational dogma.

Money

Money is their most brilliant accomplishment. While religion came from innate spirituality, patriotism from the tribe, money they invented themselves. They have convinced he slaves that money actually has some intrinsic value.

Culture
Culture is the effort to hold back the mystery, and replace it with a mythology. Terence McKenna As Terence loved to say, Culture is not your friend. It exists as a buffer to authentic experience

Conclusion

Pre-Socratic scholar Peter Kingsley Everything becomes clear once we accept the fact that scholarship as a whole is not concerned with finding, or even looking for, the truth. Thats just a decorative appearance. Its simply concerned with protecting us from truths that might endanger our security; and it does so by perpetuating our collective illusions on a much deeper level than individual scholars are aware of.

"Identifying is the chief obstacle to self-remembering. A man who identifies with Anything is unable to remember himself. In order to remember one self it is necessary first of all not to identify. But in order to learn not to identify man must first of all not be identified with himself, must not call himself 'I' always and on all occasions. He must remember that there are two in him, that there is himself, that is 'I' in him, and there is another with whom he must struggle and whom he must conquer if he wishes at any time to attain anything. So long as a man identifies or can be identified, he is the slave of everything that can happen to him. Freedom is first of all freedom from identification. Gurdjieff

Can human beings living in a cave, which has a mouth open toward the light? Here they have been from their childhood and have their legs and necks chained so they cannot move. They can only see in front of them, being prevented by the chains from turning their heads around. Plato, Allegory of the Cave Like ourselves, and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave. The people in Platos cave only see shadows of objects, all created by man, which includes more than objects, such as social institutions.

When any of them is liberated and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn around and walk and look toward the light, he will suffer sharp pains. The glare will hurt him and he will be unable to see the realities of which, in his former state, he has only seen the shadows. Then imagine someone says to him what he saw before was an illusion; but now, when he is approaching nearer to reality and his eye is turned toward more real existence, he has a clearer vision.

The Allegory of the Cave Plato's

However, the problem with seeing reality for the first time is that When he approaches the sunlight his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities. Therefore, Plato surmises; That he will need to grow accu stomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves.Last of all he will be able to see the sun and not mere reflections of it in the water Plato calls this process the ascent of the soul in to the world of Forms And that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul... [i]