Society and the True Self, Part 4: Up from Inside the Matrix
In my last post I described how many of us awaken to find ourselves in the middle of a life that is more a reflection of social mores than our own autonomous choices. We look at the reality of our lives and realize that the choices that we have made are expressions of the social status quo than any true individual preferences. We awaken to find ourselves ‘in the Matrix’ and along with this realization comes a tremendous sense of liberation as we sense the reality of a deeper Self that exists within us beyond the constraint of social habit.
Many at this point begin seriously to work on their own psychological or spiritual development. And through this effort they begin to grow dramatically and discover possibilities they never imagined before. Their struggle becomes how to live and act and think outside of the matrix. How do we avoid melting back into the status quo of social expectation and custom? Most of us, without realizing it, fall back into the anonymity of the crowd. In fact, we only realize this after the fact, when we have our next ‘awakening’ experience and pop out of the matrix again. Maybe it has been a few weeks, a few months or a few years since the moment of our last awakening. However long it has been, when we do reemerge into the possibility of deeper freedom, we immediately become aware of our last moment of true freedom. We often wonder how we could have fallen back to sleep. For many this cycle repeats over an over and over again.
I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of us – and I include myself– might not have the inner strength and fortitude to remain open and free on our own in a sleeping world. We might last for a time, but the constant pressure from society to conform sooner or later causes us to fall back in line. Some conclude from this that they must devote themselves to building a degree of inner strength that will allow them to hold their awakening come what may. I believe there is a better solution.
If you wake up in the matrix and you are not strong enough to stay awake on your own then find others who have similarly awakened, and form an awakened sub-matrix within the matrix. When awakened individuals come together in the direct recognition of their own deeper freedom and autonomy they can recreate the world – or at least a local version of it. By coming together inspired by the deeper nature of who we are we can create a new culture and change the nature of our relationships and shared expectations.
In earlier posts I spoke about language – the sentences we habitually use in speaking and those that exist in our heads as thought. Our personal and shared expectations about life are contained in language. Change our language and we will change our lives. As an awakened sub-matrix we can change the way we speak, think, and act together. We can form relationships that do not pull each other back into unconsciousness but constantly reinforce awakening and spur each other to even higher awareness.
As the language we use together becomes a deeper expression of the truth of who we really are, that language begins to become internalized by everyone using it. It becomes not only the way we talk, but also the way we think. Now we start to make different decisions about how to live, and together we create new norms and social customs, and build a way of life that is a reflection of our highest realization.
This new way of life will be better than the one reflected in the wider society from which we have awoken. It will attract the attention of others. The language, thought patterns, and ways of being that we have created will be emulated. And eventually we might contribute to the evolution of society as a whole.
Thanks for relating THE MATRIX to evolution and spiritual awakening. Yours is the message I’ve taken from THE MATRIX since I first viewed it, and I’ve enjoyed teaching that message to my high school Language of Film class for the past five years. The film is a great gateway into conversations about the ways we sleepwalk through our lives blissfully unaware of how much we bear in common with our mammalian cousin, the lemming.
Thanks John, your students are lucky to have you.
Life conspires to distract most of us from exploring the issues of identity, spiritual and existential matters. For most, if everythings OK job-wise, with interpersonal relationships and health, there’s no problem. But for some there may come a time when a gnawing at that complacency becomes too insistent, a feeling that there must be more to life.
In my own experience, this came about in my 40s and I couldn’t dismiss my yearning to know myself and to achieve higher spiritual consciousness which I naively set out to attain Enlightenment. After some anguish and a lot of yearning, I eventually and fortuitously experienced an Awakening Event, Hallelujah!
Is there can be an easier way? I submit that the more sincere and easrnest, even arduous, the journey, the deeper the spiritual consciousness will be, avoiding going crazy in the process.
Namaste, O pilgrims!
Thanks, Jeff. Awakening from a human-designed program is a great metaphor, but to whose metaphor do we awake? Our sense of self is still intermediated by a matrix, by an agreed language. To whose language, syntax and vocabulary do we awake?
I remember awakening from a dream in a sweat and so grateful that the dream’s hold on me was over. But then I awoke again with the same feeling, and I wondered if I was yet in another dream! Would I need to awake again and how would i ever know that I had truly awoken to an unfiltered and raw reality that was completely reliable? While I still wander the earth without certainty on this question, over the years, I have come to believe that one never fully awakes and nor need one fully awake. The only wisd may be ignorance and an abiding commitment to continuing to awaken ourselves as well as others.
What has been a more recent awakening for me is the necessity of awakening within a community with others who are similarly committed to mutual awakening. But this poses the concern of the community forging a language that has its own, even if unintended tyranny. Thus, What I now spend a great deal of time trying to sense and understand is how varied the languages and modalities of awakening can be. I usually find myself reaching backward in time in an effort to enliven what we have left behind or forgotten. Or should I say realities from which what we have fallen asleep? As I read your essay I thought of Dante, the great medieval Christian poet’s metaphor at the beginning of the fist book, The Inferno, of his much larger epic poem, The Divine Comedy, in which he claims having discovered in mid-life that he was alone and lost in the woods. The journey of discovery is then through hell, purgatory and finally the paradise of true relationship with godhead–his answer to a reliable language (logos).
Dear Kurt,
Thank you for your insights. It does occur to me that our awakenings into the world are relative awakenings. We wake up from one conditioned state to a less, or perhaps only alternatively conditioned state.
My deepest experiences of freedom have come during meditation. At those times I have sometimes tasted a freedom that is completely beyond the mind. It is simply a sense of pure undifferentiated existence – just being. Afterward my mind creates all kinds of ideas about what happened – but they weren’t there at the time.
I suppose the way I relate to all this now is I strive to be clear and decisive in my actions based on my highest understanding of truth and at the same time totally open to the fact that everything I think not might be replaced by something else in the next moment.
It seems to me that cultural progresses through a series of more enlightened sets of conditioning and that if we can escape from the matrix of our current cultural conditioning we will be in a position to help create the next more enlightened version for everyone. That is probably about the best thing we can do.
By the way I also have a passion for looking into the literature of the past. I have come to realize that people from ages gone by might have been constrained by limitations of the conditioning of their own time, they also might not be constrained by the conditioning of ours. So I often find incredible insights that totally shift my way of seeing in writing from ages past.
We have lots to talk about,
Jeff
Where do we find and communicate with others who have awakened ?…i too have these and many other thoughts theories and question! Is there an established community for individual’s such as ourselves?