Escape 'the Matrix': Breaking Free of Illusions for an Authentic Meaningful Life

By Jake Lyron

Jake Lyron examines the 'Matrix' of illusions the world has ended in through the domination of media, the digital world and super-consumerism. He shows how this apparent advancement has eroded happiness and wellbeing and offers as a solution a simpler way of life in accord with nature and traditional values. Illuminating for the problem, inspiring for the solution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jake Lyron
• Release date: Jan 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311311603

Jake Lyron

Jake is an activist for a sane world. His book "The Shrink from Planet Zob: Psychiatry for a Mad World" earned him a Mental Health Hero Award from leading mental health organisations for his contribution to the field. He publishes books which illuminate, creating clarity on reality expounding what Jake calls 'the spirituality of reality', a spirituality which makes sense from a scientific as well as a spiritual perspective. To this end he has also written about his new theory of the Holy Grail symbol in his book "The Holy Grail's Lost Meaning: Symbol of Receptiveness to Truth and Love". Google his author name to find all of the books he has published or find them on this, his Smashwords profile page.

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Escape the Matrix:

Breaking Free of Illusions for an Authentic and Meaningful Life

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Jake Lyron. All rights reserved.

The right of Jake Lyron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988 (UK Law).

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

What is ‘the Matrix’?

The Rat Race

The Human Equation

The Media

Stuff

Your Body is Your Temple

Getting Around

Spirituality

The Future of the World

Notes

More By Jake Lyron

What is ‘the Matrix’?

"The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out of the window, when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."

That is how the character Morpheus described the Matrix in the first of The Matrix series of films. In the film, all of humanity has been turned into pacified slaves by a race of machines. While the humans lie inert in pods generating electricity for the machines, into their minds are fed a simulated reality which the pod occupants perceive to be completely real. The simulated reality is called the Matrix. They feel they have lives, jobs, families, loves and happiness, while all the while they are in fact cocooned inside their pods. A team of liberators who have escaped their captivity enter into the Matrix to rescue the hero of the film, Neo, who is said to be the one chosen to rescue all of humanity. When Morpheus, leading the rescue team meets Neo, he presents Neo with a choice – to take one of two pills. Take the blue pill and life goes on for him inside the illusion of the computer generated Matrix and he will never come to know reality. Take the red pill and the illusion is destroyed and he is on his way out. Neo, of course, takes the red pill and comes to see the truth.

But it isn’t just science fiction: the Matrix exists. I don’t mean that we are unknowingly wired up to a sophisticated computer Matrix which pacifies us, but we are certainly held under a veil of illusion which seems perfectly real and which causes us to make life choices which are not the choices we would make if we truly exercised our free will.

The idea that there is reality and a separate world of illusion has been around for millennia. The ancient Taoists recorded as much in works such as Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching . Lao Tzu showed how human perception differs from absolute reality in which there are no illusions, what Taoists call Tao, most commonly translated as the way. Even though knowledge of the Matrix has been around for so long most of us are still slaves to this system of illusion.

This veil of illusion dominates the world. It controls our politics, economics, media, work life, the things we choose to buy and the relationships we have. Every day of our lives we are subject to this invisible power on our minds which makes us believe we are in control of our lives when in truth it is the illusion which is in control of us.

But why worry about it? Most people don’t. When you are in the Matrix you are blissfully unaware of the fact so most people think the Matrix doesn’t even exist, and hence they never worry. But occasionally cracks appear in the fabric of the Matrix and somebody somewhere will get that curious feeling that things are not as they truly should be.

I was interested to know how people would view being in a Matrix and if they would prefer a happy illusion to a reality which is uncertain and occasionally unpleasant. I posted an opinion poll onto Facebook asking which of the two options people would prefer. Most chose the challenging reality, but a significant proportion chose the veil of illusion, something which came as a surprise to me.

What creates the Matrix? For the most part it is our genes which create it. Our minds are in conflict: at times there are benefits to knowing reality - being outside the Matrix of illusion, at other times we create the illusions to fool others or even to fool ourselves.

For example, if you were planning a river cruise in Australia, you would be wise to know which rivers were infested with crocodiles – ignore the reality and you risk being swallowed up. At times like that we need to be free from the Matrix, to understand and navigate reality as our survival depends on it.

At other times, we create the illusions. There is selfishness in all of us, to degrees, but that selfishness is socially undesirable so we continually create little lies to pretend we are more altruistic than we are in reality. And when somebody else believes those falsehoods it is then that we have put them in the Matrix. We all do this. Selfishness is the number one most important survival trait, and the power it has over us is enormous. This power to create illusions is so common that often we can’t ‘see the wood for the trees’; we consider ourselves and others to be a lot kinder than we are in reality.

Deception to hide dangerous motives pervades all life. Consider the angler fish. It has a kind of ‘fishing rod’ growing from its head which dangles a light in front of its mouth. This gives the appearance of a small floating morsel which another fish is tempted to swallow up. But that fish has been pulled into the Matrix. Its perception no longer correctly mirrors reality, for the light is not a morsel. And in short order, when the smaller fish approaches it is eaten by the angler fish. The ‘selfish gene’ is the primary culprit for creating the Matrix.

In evolutionary terms this happened over many millions of years. Eons ago, as animals first evolved, evolution discovered that having a map of reality was useful to help navigate reality, and so by natural selection that map evolved into being, becoming what we now know as the brain. Then when the brain was in use by animals, there followed a new survival strategy. Other life forms discovered they could have a survival benefit if they were to feed falsehoods into those brains. To distort the mental map, that is, to create a Matrix. Plants do this too. In Britain the stinging nettle is an unassuming straggly plant which is very common all over the British countryside. Brush your skin against it and you will immediately feel its sting. It is a minor irritation, but serves to make you avoid the plant whenever possible, thus ensuring its own survival. But it has done so by creating an illusion. Pain serves to tell us we are in danger - it is a survival trait. But the sting from the nettle is no threat to us at all; aside from the irritation, the plant is completely harmless. So the sting is a lie. We think there is a danger where there is none: the plant has added to the Matrix of illusion.

You can guarantee that if evolution has had long enough to change an organism’s anatomy to create falsehoods then the human mind is equally ingenious at creating falsehoods to ensure our own survival.

So one organism will create a Matrix of illusion in another, but even more curious than that is that we will unconsciously choose to create illusions in our own minds.

Psychic pain is something a psychotherapist will have to deal with every working day. Mental trauma is often so painful that a therapist’s client will routinely generate their own illusions just to avoid truths which are too painful to bear. A woman may find it too painful to accept her partner has cheated on her, so she may choose to rationalise to defend his behaviour. Somebody who never pursued their childhood dreams may choose to avoid conversations about ambitions rather than admit to themselves that they have wasted so many years. Somebody who has wronged may never admit to it as the burden of guilt and shame is too frightening. Often the Matrix of illusion is self-inflicted.

I should say that perhaps nobody has ever left the Matrix completely. The mental map in one person’s mind incorporates billions of connections which generate countless map-elements which reflect the outside physical world. For example, our mental map may tell us that striking your knee with a hammer is going to hurt. Most of us have never tried that, but we feel certain it is true by consulting with our map in our minds, and that is what it told us. But the map can be faulty. Ten thousand years ago I expect most people thought the world was flat. We now know it is roughly spherical so a part of those people’s mental maps was faulty. The problem is that because the mental map is so enormous we can never know if it is perfectly correct or if it has faults, so we can never know we have left the Matrix to where our mental map is without any imperfections, and having a perfectly accurate mental map may be virtually impossible. I sometimes wonder if we are all born outside the Matrix. Maybe all new-born babies have perfect mental maps, although they are quite rudimentary. In time they learn the falsehoods passed to them by their elders, and their maps become damaged where before they were flawless. They are dragged into the Matrix where the rest of humanity resides.

Escaping the Matrix is achieved by replacing knowledge with wisdom; not by simply knowing facts, but knowing how best to live. The escapee E.F. Schumacher summed it up in his book of alternative economics Small is Beautiful: "But what is wisdom? Where can it be found? Here we come to the crux of the matter: it can be read about in numerous publications but it can be found only within oneself. To be able to find it, one has to first liberate oneself from such masters as greed and envy. The stillness following liberation – even if only momentary – produces the insights of wisdom which are obtainable in no other way." We will find that the greed Schumacher refers to is the root cause of most of the illusions of the Matrix and that mental stillness is one way to gain clarity on reality, to make good an escape.

Objectivity is something which, though it shows us the exit door to the Matrix, people struggle with a great deal. In 2000, I went on a coach trip to Prague to take part in the anti-capitalist protests which were going on there surrounding meetings of global financial leaders. I travelled with a group of Marxists and socialist workers who were, naturally, strongly in support of oppressed workers and poor people in general. I was thinking about how valuable works of art are sold and whether it was morally right or wrong for somebody to pay tens of millions of pounds for a Van Gogh painting. So, out of curiosity, I asked around the coach to see what people thought. Their reaction was quite violent as they immediately argued that of course it was wrong to buy and sell paintings at such a high price, and they thought I was essentially a jerk for even asking such a question.

But I looked at it differently. For one thing, I can’t see that anybody is bad for asking a question, since it implies that person is lacking an opinion on the subject under scrutiny. If you don’t know about something, people can’t grasp that you will admit to not knowing.

But also, looked at objectively, it seemed the transaction of money around the painting wasn’t actually harmful in any way. In reality, what happens is that digits stored in two bank accounts on a computer are altered to make the money change hands and a second hand painting is moved from one room to another. In reality, nobody suffers, nobody is bombed, attacked, murdered, driven to hunger or mental suffering. But the socialist workers couldn’t see it and they virtually ostracised me for daring to even ask the question. When I tried to explain the objective reality, they argued all the more and we made no progress at all.

In reality, you can’t feed poor people with a painting; you can only feed them with food, so the Van Gogh painting has little use for those on the verge of starvation. Neither can money feed people; you can’t feed people with electrons stored in semi-conductors in the bank’s computer, and you can’t feed people with coins or bank notes. It is impossible to feed people by either selling a valuable painting or keeping it. You can feed people by giving money to charities like Oxfam, but the selling of the painting makes no difference to that. Prior to the sale the person with the money could give it to Oxfam, but after the sale, the other person who gets the money could still give it to Oxfam, the sale of the painting itself makes no difference to whether poor people can be fed or not.

Even if the money eventually ends up with Oxfam, I suspect the complexities of economics mean it may not have the full desired effect in solving poverty as Oxfam would like.

In reality, what does happen with the painting is that a different resource is moved around, and that resource is more subtle, it is aesthetic. If the Van Gogh is purchased by some ultra-rich business woman who stores it in her living room, then poorer people are being denied an aesthetic commodity simply because that woman was lucky in how she managed to manipulate the capitalist system to her own advantage. So poor people are denied aesthetic works of art as much as they are denied decent shelter, food or water.

This anecdote illustrates how people react to the Matrix. Some issues, like the one concerning the valuable painting, have a superficial understanding which is sometimes incorrect. People don’t always stop to think about something. Partly that is because they refuse to admit that they don’t understand. Not understanding means they may look foolish and to maintain a public image of masterful wisdom they may pretend they are wise when really they are not.

Thinking is the way out of the Matrix, since the illusions it creates are in the mind and thinking is the process of making our opinions mirror reality. Reality is outside the Matrix. Think to make good your escape. But to think, you will need to be humble.

After the protests in Prague, which turned into riots, our coach brought us back to Britain. On the coach we were supplied with tea of sorts, which was a dry powder to which we added hot water to make a drink. It wasn’t as good as fresh tea. As we went through the German border, we had to wait a while and people got off the coach to walk around. In the services there was a café which was selling tea made properly with tea bags. I pointed this out to the Marxists on the coach, They’re selling proper tea out there, I told them, but don’t have any, whatever you do. Why not? one of them asked. Well, I replied, just remember, all proper tea is theft.

There is also the difficulty that when we are under an illusion it seems very real. So when we are in the Matrix, one symptom is that we will think that we are not. We know we are on the way out when we can look back at ourselves and see how we were previously deluded.

So, sadly we can never know we have completely escaped the Matrix. Leaving the Matrix will pertain to one specific issue at a time. We may for instance leave the Matrix by knowing a particular religion contains falsehoods, but simultaneously believe another separate illusion, say that countries exist. Hypothetically, we could assess the percentage of an individual’s thoughts and come up with a percentage for what fraction of their mental map is accurate. We might then be able to say that John Smith is 95.5 per cent out of the Matrix. Unfortunately though, we are unlikely to acquire the technology to make such an assessment of the entirety of a person’s beliefs. The best we can hope for is to know that on a specific question we have successfully left the Matrix.

I want to add that I don’t claim to have left the Matrix entirely myself. I am aware that I still do things which are irrational and taught to me by others, and that is the Matrix way of things. And I can’t know if I have delusions which to me may appear completely real. If it seems I write this book from a position of arrogant superiority, that would be incorrect.

I also wish to add that the Matrix isn’t all bad. Sometimes being part of the huge physical Matrix that makes the world go round has benefits. But the Matrix of illusions is another matter, and much of the time those illusions cause suffering.

This book is for those who choose the red