\maketitle
Perhaps you have seen the movie The Matrix. Neo chooses to take the red pill and is awakened into a higher-order reality where the world he lived in was merely a simulation designed to placate the mind while the body was harnessed as a source of energy.
As you walked out of the theater, perhaps subconsciously rubbing the back of your neck, you tried to shake a sense of unease. If you were living in such an artificial world, how would you wake up? If you were offered a red pill and a blue pill, would you really want to stay in Wonderland and find out how far the rabbit hole goes?
The matrix is real. If you are truly happy with how the world appears to work, this is as far as you should go. You can think of me as Morpheus, and what follows is a schematic for producing a red pill.
You are born into the matrix. At birth, your genetic and pre-natal environment have already encoded the hardware with which you must decode the higher-order Reality that exists beyond you. Your senses provide detectors by which to make observations of the world within the constraints of what our human biology has evolved to perceive.
What happens after birth, however, is where your senses are immediately hijacked to imprint the matrix operating system in your mind. From the first word you learn, the world is broken apart into the pieces as seen by our ancestors. The programming language of the matrix is language itself.
Words are powerful. In naming an entity, one simultaneously creates the potential to manipulate whatever has been named. It was through words that humans were able to exert their will upon the natural world and harness the sources of energy that exist therein.
Unfortunately, one of the greatest sources of energy are other human beings. Slavery and the mechanization of humans allows for tremendous feats to be accomplished. Slaves built the pyramids in Egypt just as they build the pyramids in the United States of America.
The amount of power accrued through human bondage is not easily relinquished. When manacles go out of fashion, how do you continue to bind the will of another? Words allow you to build worlds into which people are born where the language they think in traps them in a lower dimension of the World.
If we do not have a plug in the back of our neck, how do we become trapped in the matrix? These days, we typically all carry the plug in our pocket. When we return home in the evenings, we sit to bathe in more of the soothing light we call media.
The worlds from which this electromagnetic radiation propagates are artificial. Even that which we think of as news is a manufactured product that dabbles in fear-based tactics to subvert our evolutionary wiring and command our attention. This is how the matrix works. To control people, you simply need to control their minds.
How do you wake up? You must learn to regain control of your thoughts.
Start by carefully tailoring the information streams that enter your head. Reducing TV and cellphone usage allows you to regain editorial control of your thoughts and connect with the reality that directly surrounds you. Learning another language provides you with a new programming language to manipulate and perceive the world.
If you truly want to disconnect from the matrix of words, zazen (\jntext{座禅}) or sitting meditation is a tool that lets you perceive the world beyond that which can be described with words. When you attain mushin (\jntext{無心}) or no mind, you have allowed your senses to connect directly with the Universe.
Even though I can tell you steps of how to manufacture a red pill, it is up to you whether or not you want to take it. The world beyond the constructs of human understanding is a truly beautiful but lonely place – words cannot describe it. Not everyone has the discipline or courage to escape into the Unknown.
The matrix, or society, in its current manifestation is a self-perpetuating form of modern-day slavery. We are taught to trade our time as a commodity, a construct of the Industrial Revolution where people became part of the machine.
We can continue to live in this world where we are symbolically manipulated as cogs. The status quo is becoming encoded into the foundation of the new matrix that is now running on artificial intelligences that are limited by the minds of its architects and the bias in the data from which it learns.
Or, we can start to wake up so that we can envision a better society that exists in a reality beyond that which we can currently perceive.
You can take the blue pill and go back to sleep, or you can see where the red pill takes you and then go help other people wake up.