“This is your last chance; after this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
—Morpheus to Neo from “The Matrix”
I had an epiphany last night. It wasn’t the usual kind of inspiration I get which involves wearing my underwear inside out in order to get an extra few days of wear before a gag reflex from not only everyone around me but myself as well forces me to finally surrender them to the laundry. Once I realized the magnitude of what I had come to understand, I felt a tremendous load lifted off my shoulders and slept peacefully, not giving a second thought to the problems of mankind. It was similar to that amazing scene in “Good Will Hunting” on the park bench where Robin Williams said to Matt Damon how something occurred to him and he fell into a deep peaceful sleep and hadn’t thought about him since, that Ben Affleck was just dead weight and Matt needed to dump his sorry ass like Affleck had dumped J.Lo if he ever wanted to do anything more than straight-to-video B-rate stinkers.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM-gZintWDc]
Years ago I had a hint of my great revelation when I opened a yoga class with the pivotal question from the movie “The Matrix”:
“If you had the choice of taking the red pill, which would take you out of the Matrix, or the blue pill, which would keep you embedded in the Matrix, which would you choose?”
I wasn’t prepared for the first response, which came from one of my semi-regular students—but enough about her bowels.
“I’m pregnant with my first child. I like my job…life is going pretty well for me—I’d take the blue pill.”
I was stunned. It was as if I had been arranging for us slaves to finally escape from the plantation and the night of the break the other slaves said, “Tonight’s meatloaf night—we’re out.” And as if that wasn’t bad enough, then they started to try and convince me that an occasional beating and a little name calling wasn’t the worst thin in the world, when I was at the point that if I heard one more white piece of shit use the word “nigger” again I was going to go postal, which in those days meant trampling him with the Pony Express.
What I’ve come to realize is that most people don’t want to wake up from the Matrix. They’re happy to be living their dream life, even if it’s a nightmare.
“Dude, I gotta score me some acid,” said Rufus. His friend Reggie couldn’t understand this.
“Every time you do acid you have a bad trip. Last time you saw devil heads and I had to hold you for two hours until you stopped screaming. The time before that you got so nauseous you threw up all over yourself. The time before that you ripped off all your clothes, shouting that ‘killer ants’ were eating you alive and then you proceeded to run down the block naked and ended up spending the night in a jail cell. After all that, why would you want to do another hit of acid?”
Rufus smiled and said, “At least I’d be high.”
In Judaism and Christianity there’s The Ten Commandments—“Don’t kill anyone, don’t steal from anyone and keep your dick out of your neighbor’s wife.”
In yoga there’s the Yamas—“Don’t harm, don’t lie, don’t steal, and keep your dick out of everyone” (brahmacharya or “celibacy”). 97% of yoga teachers teach nothing more than a low-impact aerobics class. 2% spit out a few Sanskrit terms they managed to memorize and on occasion mention some yogic principles but will avoid any discussion of brahmacharya because it sounds retarded even to them, so instead they play the “selective orthodoxy” method of “Thou shall not kill, that shall not steal—but if the neighbor’s wife is really hot then it’s okay to fuck her.” I belong to the 1% elite of yoga instructors who became a teacher for no other reason than to molest their students.
In Buddhism there’s talk about non-violence and compassion.
I have to side with the Moslems on this one: You have more of a chance of waking up from the nightmare by pulling a jihad and blowing yourself up into a million pieces, even if you are moronic enough to ruin it all by claiming it to be “God’s” will yet you’ll only do it if you are promised some pussy in your drunken, whoring Islamo-Heaven.
All these supposed ethical principles—even Islamic chopping a woman’s arm off if she bears it in public or killing a woman for disgracing her family if she was raped, probably also in the name of your made-up, sadistic “God”—have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with waking up. They just help a society continue to run along with business as usual while still allowing everyone to live in the nightmare undisturbed. They are like taking a course in lucid dreaming, helping one to stay aware and in control of their dreams while in the midst of them—regardless of whether you now have flying dreams or dreams where you’re wealthy and surrounded by a dozen swimsuit models, you’re still lying there unconscious in your bed.
Ay, but here’s the rub: What I call a “nightmare,” most see as “The American Dream”—or the Hindu dream, or the Buddhist dream or, with the addition of some heavy-duty explosives, the Moslem dream.
A variation to the Taoist Chang Tzu’s famous saying:
“I had a dream that I was a butterfly. When I woke up, I was not sure whether I was awake and seeing that everyone else was asleep or still asleep and dreaming that I myself was awake.”
What really sealed the deal for me happened during my midnight call with Toad last night when I was taking a breath between one of my long and venomous rants against her taking an antidepressant drug, when she asked me, “Why does it bother you so much?”
When you push your dogma on someone else who is not interested in hearing it, you come across as annoying as one of those Jesus freaks who share with you how their “personal relationship” with Jesus changed their life when if given the choice you would rather they just shared with you the AIDS instead. I just have difficulty understanding how anyone could not see the light, praise Jesus, and realize that living without this Truth coursing through your veins is living a lie, Christ be with you.
I’m reminded one veteran actor’s answer to a question posed to him by that fruity James Lipton of “The Actors Studio” and the lesser-known tea family. He was asked if he had any advice to young actors starting in “the business.” He answered, “Don’t.” and I thought this famous, successful actor was a prick and should take his own advice and get out himself. It took me finally getting fed up with “The Human Stage” to fully appreciate his advice.
To stay with the acting simile but switching things up a little…
It’s as if you’re on stage performing with a repertory group where you are playing Shakespeare tonight and tomorrow you get to play a hippie from the 60s and the day after that you will play a Knight of the Round Table, each night receiving thunderous applause and standing ovations for playing your role so well … Finally you just want to be the “you” behind all the different costumes and masks and make-up and you know if you step even one more time on the stage you will not be able to stop screaming, which will probably fuck up everyone else’s good time performing. So you say, “I’m out.” … And none of the other actors can understand why you would leave a fake life as a somebody with fame and fortune who plays around wearing tights and tie-dye and chain mail for the authentic life of a nameless, jobless nobody … And the newspaper reporters and your fans, who are just actors without a proper stage but with their own private audiences, ask you the same question … And the only answer that remotely comes close to a response to their question is, “It’s fake and I don’t have a choice.” … And you try to convince some of the actors that you have no idea what life outside of the theater may entail but that they should drop all that they have spent their whole lives creating for the slim chance that it may just be better, something that even you doubt to be the case … And when you see the confusion on the faces of the Lead Players, you turn to the Bit Players, figuring maybe they will risk their shitty breadcrumb-scavenging careers for the chance of something—if not better, then at least different. And they look at you as if you’re nuts and you finally realize that you are nuts, for they have a choice and you don’t and if you had a choice you wouldn’t leave the stage either … But you don’t have a choice. And therein lies the disconnect.
I’m not sure what lies beyond the stage door. I don’t know if Truth or Love is waiting there to take me to an exclusive club where only VIPs are allowed entrance or whether Fear and Loneliness will lead me down a dark alley and mug me and leave me lying face down in garbage and rat shit, scared and alone. All I do know is that you can shove the blue pill up your ass.
“It means buckle up your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye.”
—Cypher from “The Matrix”