The Curse of the Matrix

And How to Break it

Let us begin from the premise that a curse works best, if at all, when one believes one is cursed. If we broaden the concept of a curse to include ideas implanted in the mind of individuals and groups concerning their position in the world, their culpability in that position and what (if anything) they can do to change it, there are many curses active in the world and many afflicted by them. We hear much about the debilitating influence of internalized guilt and shame over everything from obesity to privilege, sexuality to collective guilt for the past misdeeds of one’s “people”. Our collective and individual obsession over these ideas drive enraged screeds on social media and the “self help industry”. Whichever “side” you take on a divisive issue you may be in the grip of a powerful curse.

To be clear, injustice and exploitation are as alive and well as they have ever been. Further, I, like anyone else, have my own ideas about who the perpetrators and victims are and the motives of both. But the most pervasive form of exploitation we (in the so-called “developed world”) suffer is the erosion of our sense of REALITY. One of the few statements that nearly everyone agrees on is: “things are not what they seem”. At the same time, ideas of what things actually ARE, increase exponentially. I call this “the curse of the matrix”.

In the 1999 film “The Matrix” we are presented with a world turned virtual reality prison. While the bodies of humanity have been reduced to bio-electric batteries, the energy of which is captured by some shadowy elite who presumably enjoy “real life” while we humans believe “whatever we want to believe”. It would be difficult to overestimate the cultural impact of this film. Popular terms like “red-pilled” (knowing the truth behind the lie that passes for reality), “blue-pilled” (being hoodwinked by the aforementioned lie) and even the derived “black-pilled” (a position of enlightened nihilism which believes no narrative, including the red/blue pill narrative), come directly from the lore of this film.

But the idea that our perceived reality is a sham that conceals some deeper, and almost always darker TRUE reality, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. From the demiurge fabricated world of Gnosticism to the Maya of Buddhism and Hinduism, the Soft Machine of William S. Burroughs and the Combine of Ken Kesey, humans have always been haunted by the intuition of being the pawns of forces beyond our control or even comprehension. I do not mean to suggest that there aren’t forces that leverage our deepest anxieties and desires for their own good and against our own, (advertising and propaganda are real and powerful occult powers), I suggest that our intuition of these powers can be leveraged against us more powerfully than any PARTICULAR corporate, governmental, religious or other “alien” agenda. To put it more colloquially, our bullshit detectors can be infected by the same “virus” that it evolved to detect. This infection is what I mean by The Curse of the Matrix.

Many readers have probably heard that the term “conspiracy theory” was coined by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States to describe people who questioned the findings of The Warren Commission. Although a VERRY cursory Google search will show that the term had been in use since at least the 1940s and DID NOT originate within the CIA, or any other deep state agency, people who believe the CIA conspiracy theory origin story might believe that such easy findings are PART of the conspiracy. The difficulty in refuting such a claim speaks to the heart of the curse of The Matrix.

To demonstrate how the curse is cast, let’s look at another conspiracy theory, that of Area 51. According to this narrative, an alien craft crash landed in the New Mexico desert in the late 1940s. Debris and even an alien corpse supposedly recovered from the site has been housed at the U.S. Air Force base in Roswell New Mexico and kept secret from the American people (and people of the world). I will make no claims about the credibility of this story. But if I were tasked with orchestrating such a conspiracy, this is how I would go about it.

Feed an official story to the mainstream press about some mundane event like a weather balloon crash. Meanwhile, I would, through my extensive intelligence network, identify people with the following qualities:

1.) An interest in extra-terrestrials.

2.) Who have been known to be skeptical of “official narratives” especially government narratives.

3.) Who are associated with “fringe” organizations.

4.) Are known to, or suspected of, having compromised mental health.

Once I have identified these targets, I would leak the “truth” to them through ostensibly authoritative sources (people with connections to the military and intelligence establishment). Although I know that such people would go public with the truth, I ALSO know that they would be considered unreliable by the public. Finally, I would, through official channels, continually deny the allegations while casting doubt on their source and watch as my target became increasingly paranoid and irrational further undermining their credibility while adding to that of the official story. You could keep a conspiracy of this kind going for years by drawing those who intend to expose the conspiracy INTO IT. On the other hand, if I knew that we, in fact, DID NOT have an alien on ice but were up to something even more sinister, I could use the alien story to throw those who might discover the REAL truth off the scent. I win either way.

To be VERRY clear, there ARE REAL CONSPIRACIES. The MK Ultra program is but one example of conspiracy that the CIA has admitted. What is interesting about this conspiracy is how it has generated a kind of “folklore”. What we KNOW (among other things) is that the CIA conducted experiments in the early 1960 in which LSD, among other drugs, were administered to both willing test subjects and un-consenting military personnel, prisoners and the clients of specially selected brothels. But what many suspect is that this program may also have involved entertainers such as the Grateful Dead and cult leaders like Charles Manson. The truth of such suspicions isn’t nearly as important as the mere plausibility of them. For example, I have heard such claims deployed to dismiss the entire psychedelic revolution of the 1960s as a cynical attempt to depoliticize the youth of America, to discredit the counterculture in the eyes of the “mainstream”, as an experiment in mass mind control, some combination of all three of these and so on. Once a story gets big enough, it develops a life of its own. Such an egregore, once constructed, can be recaptured for any number of purposes not intended at its creation.

Which brings me back to The Matrix.

The film was proceeded by decades of science fiction about a near future society under the total management of technocrats and their powerful machines. For a while there seemed to be a balance of hope and dread about these imagined futures – there was Brave New World but there was also Star Trek. But as the 20th century drew to a close, dystopian nightmares seemed to outnumber utopian dreams. Some of this can be put down to a widening gap between our dependence on technology and our understanding of it. Each decade seemed to bring machines that far exceeded what we thought would be possible just a few years earlier yet, the workings of these marvels became more inscrutable. Add to this the growing number of institutional scandals, from Watergate to the Monica Lewinski/Bill Clinton affair, from the Tuskegee Syphilis scandal to the connection between Agent Orange and a litany of cancers, from Jim Jones to Jim Baker. And finally, Y2K which demonstrated our vulnerability to “glitches” in the machines that dominate nearly every aspect of our everyday lives. People were ready to believe in the totalizing power of government and corporations.

The number of people who, even then, seriously considered the possibility that we live in a simulation suggests that it might not be necessary to BUILD The Matrix if enough people can be convinced that it has already been built. On the other hand, the number of people who fancy themselves “red pilled” out of The Matrix suggests something else.

Imagine that you wanted to build an immersive system of control into which you wanted to place an entire population. Wouldn’t you consider the possibility that many of these people would recognize that they were IN such a system. Wouldn't you build an algorithm into the system that would recognize such people and direct them to special parts of the system that LOOK LIKE the outside but are, in fact, just another part of it? I WOULD!

Without being interested in debunking any conspiracy narrative, I ask the reader to consider how often a weird event, in the media or in the weather, is immediately attributed to some human intervention, usually by a bad actor. It seems that it never “just rains” anymore. Is geo-engineering about decreasing the incoming solar radiation as a measure against global climate change or decreasing crop yield. Is it about serving the Oil Companies or the Food Companies? What if serving the interests of one works against the interests of another? Is any of this even real? Who says? Why do you believe them?

I write and think about the occult. I have very limited knowledge about virtual reality, artificial intelligence or any of the other things it would take to implement The Matrix. I DO, however, know something about magik and its uses, benefic and malefic. I know that an idea, like Jesus Christ or The Federal Reserve Bank, becomes more powerful the more people believe in them. I also know that if you can convince enough people that things are NEVER what they seem, two things are bound to happen. First, consensus reality breaks down. This means that fewer people can be trusted to tell the truth. Second, various “niche” realities come to replace consensus reality. These niche realities operate like cults - only people who trust the people you trust can be trusted. The increasing estrangement between friends and among families over political or cultural issues demonstrates the second phenomenon.

Why is this happening and what, if anything, can be done about it. The “why” is what it always has been, simple divide and conquer. People who cannot share beliefs cannot act in common. Who benefits from this? This is the more complex and interesting question.

The great modern occultist Ramsey Dukes has suggested that if we hear a politician or other influential person make a claim that seems false, instead of asking whether their statement is TRUE, we should ask WHY they said it. I will expand on this advice and suggest that, since we cannot see inside of another mind, we should ask ourselves why do we believe it (or not).

If we are honest with ourselves, we will always come back to “I believe what was said because it confirms other things I already believe” or “I don’t believe it because it contradicts other things I already believe”. If you get that far, ask yourself when the last time was you heard something that seemed so obviously true that it forced you to give up another belief that contradicted it. This has happened to me but rarely. When it has, it always seems, in retrospect, not to arise from a rational refutation of previously held beliefs as much as an appeal to something in my “heart”.

The Curse of the Matrix ultimately rests on making us doubt our immediate impression of the world and convincing us that this doubt is, in fact, wisdom. It is not. This is not to say that the world isn’t filled with liars and fools. But who we take to be one or both depends less on our knowledge than it does on our BELIEFS, about ourselves, one another, and the larger world. The heart believes what it wants to believe. The mind rationalizes the belief of the heart. This is as true for religious fundamentalists as for rationalists. I have made this point elsewhere but it is worth revisiting and elaborating on.

Everything you think you know is educated guess. When a baby drops enough things to the ground, he or she comes to assume that anything dropped will behave in the same way. This IS NOT knowledge, it is belief. Nor is theory knowledge. If you have learned that heavy objects fall because they are moving toward their “natural place” as Aristotle taught, it will pass for knowledge until enough counter examples accumulate to make you search for a new theory, gravity for example. If this seems anti-rational, I can only say that rationalization always happens AFTER THE FACT. Whether this fact is that a brick falls, or that I did something I regret. This is not to say that things don’t happen for REASONS, but there is a gap between the fact and the explanation that gets filled by what we call a reason but is just a guess. Science has its’ reasons; religion has its’ own. Who is right depends on what you believe or do not. But what does this have to do with The Matrix? To answer that question, we must return to the gap between fact and explanation, a gap that can become a terrifying chasm.

Why do bad things happen? What do we mean by bad? When I eat a steak it is good FOR ME, not so much for the poor cow. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. But in the end, the “house” always wins, that is to say, the gambling house in which all games occur. This is our world. In Tarot, Jupiter is represented by The Wheel of Fortune. Sometimes fortune favors us, sometimes it favors others. Jupiter is, among other things, about big ideas. Philosophy, religion, law, even science. He rules all the things that guide our lives by suggesting that the world is an ordered place. He is represented by The Wheel of Fortune because, in the material world, all things happen in time. For one to win, someone has to lose, if I eat, someone else gets eaten. Someone else doesn’t like this fact any more than I do but that is how the wheel turns. In the end, everyone gets to eat and everyone gets eaten. Everyone gets to play but the house always wins. This truth seems so obvious as to be beyond the need for further explanation but, when it is my turn to have a bad day, I don’t WANT it to be true. But, as Dogen Zenji wisely taught, “the flower dies even though you love it, the weed grows even though you hate it”. This is wisdom but nothing in the world demands that we be wise, at least not in the short run. Instead …

In The Matrix, when the hero, Neo, learns this from Morpheus:

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You see it when you look out your window or 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 you are a slave … like everybody else, you were born into bondage, into a prison that you can not smell or taste or touch, a prison for your mind.

When my kids were little we used to send them to Vacation Bible School. Each year there was a theme, space exploration, the wild kingdom of creation and so on. These themes were constructed around bible stories designed to assure the youth that God loved them and was on their side. One summer the theme was built around the story of Paul and Silas in prison. The theme for the year was that “The World is a Prison”. This was the summer that I nearly pulled them out of vacation bible school.

I hate the notion that the world is a prison, that the material world keeps us from recognizing some “higher reality”. I hate it when Christians and Buddhists teach it, I hate it in the story of Marduk and Tiamat and I hate it when it comes dressed up in sleek special effects and martial arts moves. I hate it because it is not true. In my opinion, the story that we live in a false reality, IS ITSELF the false reality that enslaves us. It does this in two ways: First, it makes us believe that we cannot trust our senses. This is a poisonous lie because everything good we ever feel: the kiss of our mothers, lovers, The Sun, the sweet taste of the fruit that alerts us to its life giving power, even the shivering thrill that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, alerting us to the spirit world, is a lie meant to deceive and enslave us. The second is that it allows us to believe that everything bad comes from OUTSIDE of us. The Matrix was built by OTHERS, by ALIENS who harvest our energy. Those who built it are not like us, their motivations are not the same as ours, in other words, we were pure and innocent before they polluted OUR world with THEIR unholy intention (one wonders if the plant kingdom feels that way about US). This has the effect of allowing us to believe that everything “wrong” with “our” world arises from some place and someone other than ourselves. The whole idea disempowers us while pretending to enlighten us.

As an animist, I believe that I am embedded in a network of living beings, animal, vegetable, and mineral. This entire network embodies and expresses the will of spirit. This spirit is no more “good” or “evil” than a lion who kills and eats a gazelle or a person who kills and eats a strawberry. The only evil is to believe that our will to live and thrive is more justified than anyone else’s. The one who wants to “harvest my energy” is ultimately motivated by the same thing that makes me want to harvest anything I do. I can decide to surrender, to feed the other, to deny them food, fight against them or combine forces with them so we can BOTH eat (some other poor bastard). But what I do NOT get to do is pretend that they aren’t just another child of earth.

The spirit world is carried and borne by the material world. Matrix, matter, MOTHER EARTH. She is NOT an artifact constructed to enslave us, she is a living sea of inscrutable solidity that grants life to the spirit world. The suggestion that this is not so is just another way of turning us away from life, and perhaps, from the divine feminine. You are not out of the Matrix when you think you have escaped it. You are out of it when you realize that it is literally the only place to BE.

Afterwords

OK, I liked the film, a lot in fact, one of my favorites. At the time I liked it for the reasons that most people did and still do. I thought it was deep and true. I still think it is deep but profoundly false. This doesn’t keep me from still liking it. I am a huge fan of advertising and propaganda and, as you might suspect from my treatment of the MK Ultra program, even the machinations of big government. As a magician, I can admire the skill of my enemy without embracing them as a friend. There are War Gods, Tir, for example, who don’t care about the motivation of either side but only whether they fight honorably and skillfully. This might seem repellant to people who believe themselves to be “principled”. Such people should consider that an unwillingness to respect and learn from one’s enemy might indicate a weakness that is bound to undermine the ability to fight for the principles one upholds.

The 61st chapter of the I Ching, entitled “Inner Truth” is built around a Chinese character that depicts either a bird’s foot over a fledgling or the claw of a predator closing on its prey. The chapter teaches that whether we wish to cultivate a creature or to hunt it, we must understand it in its deepest nature. If you are so turned off by someone or something that you perceive as contrary to your wellbeing, you won’t know how to approach it. This is when the predator’s claw closes upon you. At the same time, if you understand the teaching of the other, you learn something about your own nature. This is a thing worth learning whether you like the “other” or not.