Do not be misled by what you see around you, or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideals. But you are not part of that world. — Sai Baba The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge. — Daniel Boorstin You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. — Buckminster Fuller Do not try to bend the spoon, that is impossible. Instead try to understand the truth…There is no spoon. Then you’ll see it’s not the spoon that bends, only yourself. — Spoon Boy, The Matrix

At the height of empire a boundless stream of lies are told through euphemistic abstractions. These abstractions are but illusion, they obscure perceptions by never directly dealing with the actual physical reality. Instead an interface is placed over the existing reality for purposes of control.

How often does one hear from corporate news sources about trying to build more homes or grow more food so there are no more homeless or hungry? Almost never, because there is already enough of both food and housing for all in the US, but what there is not enough of is the abstraction of money and that is what corporate news speaks of the most. The one thing we can create an infinite amount of is somehow the one thing we don’t have enough of so the people can have access to housing and food that already exist.

These abstractions are designed with the intent to flummox the people and hold them in place with abstract coercions that intend to create dependence and learned helplessness. We are told the automobiles that kill the environment and weapons designed to kill people are abstractions for freedom. We’re told a government that leads the world in mass incarceration is also an abstraction of preventing tyranny and providing security, democracy, and justice. Organized religion in the US is worth around $1.2 trillion a year, more money than Google and Apple combined, and is an abstraction of spirituality, community, and giving while never making a dent in any social problem.

Science has become an abstraction of wisdom, progress, and reason while evidently receiving their spiritual center from the aforementioned shoddy organized religion, as they continue to ignore harm they cause in favor of ostensible discovery, but what they are really discovering is how a corporation can concoct something that makes more money. Social media and likes become an abstraction for relationships, validation, and human connection. And most insidious of all money is an abstraction of self worth, material possessions, privilege, power, success, and labor. Our virtual reality is complete sans the clunky head gear.

The illusion is created via layers of interfaces stacked on top of each other, similar to the creation of art which is made by adding layers of meaning through a chosen medium until the aggregate of the layers become a gestalt, or something more than its individual pieces. Such is the way the illusion is created for the people, which is intended to hold them in place. They see only the gestalt and cannot understand the underlying truth around the world of false narratives elites have weaved over thousands of years of ownership and domination culture in western society.

The abstractions are man-made interfaces created by those in power to drive people towards predetermined outcomes. Abstractions are the propaganda by which we live our lives. They are not real, but the imposition of these abstractions forces us down the same illusory paths as they gaslight our waking reality.

Notice again, how nothing in American society is done directly, like when one needs medical care instead of going directly to a doctor they typically first get insurance so one can afford a doctor and are given doctors on a pre-approved list, along with only being approved for select treatments by said insurance. A certain crowd of people talk all day about the horrors of government getting in between them and their doctor, yet in America, predatory capitalism is a perfectly acceptable guest in their doctor’s office, as they assume that no one in the history of time has ever tried to sell people things they didn’t need or price gouge them for things they absolutely do need.

Or in the food situation, we don’t typically grow food directly. We instead go to miserable jobs to get the money to buy the food. Or when we don’t have a place to live, we don’t typically build a house ourselves, not that most people have time to build a house since, you know, we’re stuck at those miserable capitalist jobs so we can afford to eat. And we can’t afford to buy a home either because the miserable capitalist job doesn’t pay enough, and so it goes down the line of needs. A list of expenses that the capitalist jobs are supposed to be able to cover but they don’t. Just about everyone in the lower classes finds themselves in debt and working more hours to end up owing someone else money to live.

The system is as maddeningly irrational as it is cruel. A Sisyphean system that is seemingly inescapable where significantly more debt exists than money to pay off the debt. Now I say irrational only in relation to 99.99% of people on the planet, as it’s a perfectly rational position for lost souls at the top of the hierarchy who are ensconced in the throes of capitalist egomania.

Everyday in modernity people say things like “Well, you need money to live.” – Such utterances are said with an absolute certainty like the money could be consumed for nourishment with a nice chianti and some fava beans. To believe in money to such a degree is a delusionary psychopathy; a diseased state of being, which accepts artificial precepts as a primary necessity for survival. The reality is the money is only a tool for control by power. It’s the neo-whip.

Anyone that has a child knows they can control quite a bit of behavior by limiting their child’s access to funds and controlling what they can spend their funds on, or by altering what the child desires by what they are exposed to. Parents routinely reward certain behaviors to get the outcomes they seek, and you often see parents using their kids like indentured servants forcing them to do work for an allowance or just to be able to socialize with other kids.

Similarly the people are treated like children by a wealthy elite parent class. Most people have little interest in capitalist machinations, evidenced by the fact a whopping 80% of Americans are unhappy with their role as servant, that would be a hundred percent if they understood what kind of world is possible compared to what we are settling for. Very few have an interest in continuing to use oil, but if you can make people desperate enough to pay rent then they’ll go out on an oil rig and drill baby drill, just as they have little interest in war but through desperation they’ll kill baby kill.

The illusion is this system, the man behind the curtain; elites are playing a game and then pretending like their capitalist system is a natural order, like it was ever something democratically chosen. But Arthur Young long ago laid down the basic premise for the necessity of the illusions in capitalism when he said, “Every one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” Or in other words, the illusion of scarcity must be thrust upon them or they’ll never show up at the bullshit jobs.

The wars give the illusion like America cares for the safety of the people to the degree the government will aggressively pursue signing up desperate naive teenagers with much life to live and put them in harm’s way to keep us “safe.” It’s not clear what kind of safety is offered to people by a society that throws its youth into traumatic situations so a bunch of old rich codgers can make more money. This form of safety seems like a good recipe to provoke hatred against us and is the antithesis of fostering a peaceful cooperative world.

The edifices of our society are colored and detailed with nebulous misapprehensions, most nebulous of all is universal fiat currency, and everywhere it traverses empire is created without the need for firing a shot. It forces action via coercion and puts people into roles they wouldn’t do otherwise.

The ruling class likes to shame those they lord over for not working hard while ironically they do little else other than signing documents. They like to claim it’s then a profitable skill they should be rewarded for greatly to manage the complex rigged system they created for their benefit with their lawyers, contracts, corporations, loans, government institutions, courts, weapons, threats, and coercions. A capitalist’s claim to money usually rests on how they learned how to exploit you better and with less compassion. It truly takes someone that cares very little for anything but themselves to hoard power in such a tyrannical manner and then consistently try and rationalize their system as a benefit to all.

If there was real symbiosis in our society no one would have to be forced to do anything because the benefit of the actions would have equal benefit for all. But the creation of most things in capitalism is for the financial benefit of a small oligarchy and hence the people often have little interest in contributing to helping elites since most of the benefit goes to those who are already rich and powerful.

The money is such a perfect tool because it’s so easy to manipulate and it’s more surreptitious in disguising its intents than ordering someone around with a gun. If the masses became wealthy enough where they have better options, and thus refuse to work down in a mine shaft, then this is when the money is tightened by the ruling class. And all you have to do to restrict money flow is give out less loans at banks, or raise rents by increasing interest rates and suddenly you put a pinch on the common man. Add in property taxes so their home, typically their primary investment, can be taken from them at any time if they can’t cough up those taxes, and thus they’ll scramble to take those jobs.

If a ruler is going to adequately hold brutal reign over people, as all leaders do in some form, they must coerce, divide, and manipulate people to get them to do the things they want. And when those things are directly opposed to the held values of a person you then have to frame the action under an acceptable premise. Blinders must be placed on the human animal so that it continues to drag the emperor’s plow and carriage.

There is a sticky social glue that holds the fabric of reality together and it is based on nothing more than a perception and what we collectively believe. The contemporary state of our self-abusing beliefs says we have to wait for a president’s term to end before we can think about making desperately needed changes to this society and change the way we are living. Our held beliefs that capitalism offers some kind of fundamental liberty is an impediment to the freedom of the entire global population, because capitalism has always been a tool of control formulated by elites to rig the game in their favor. The people will not be free under any system where there is a centralized power, and continuing to pretend capitalism is anything but exploitation is to never realize the nature of the trap. But this is not to assume a centralized state run communism structure is any better. It is the opposite side of the authoritarian coin, a double bind coercion. They give you bad cop/worse cop options, China or America, blech and blech.

This way of being was never decided on by a vote of the people, there was never an alternative option. We were simply forced into this state, often violently so. We seem to have no recollection that indigenous Native American people lived prosperously for hundreds of years without much of a mercantile system, no stock markets, no lawyers, no mass incarceration system, no weapons of mass destruction, no corporations – And yet somehow, somehow, the majority of them managed to find meaning, community, and purpose in life.

In truth we cannot be free of illusions manifested in the material until we free our minds of what lies exist in the realm of thought and the false values we live our lives by; the shame, punishment, domination, and ownership installed in dogmatic systems of control have to go. There’s a lyric from Florence and the Machine that goes “It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back, so shake him off.” We cannot be free, we cannot dance in the sun, we cannot do anything until enough of us see past these illusions to create a new reality.

And to create this new reality, we must get right in our minds. Take care of our bodies, take care of each other, take care of our state of consciousness. Get strong in the mind. Do no harm to others, be humble and learn from all. Tried and true paths of reaching greater enlightenment often include meditation, walks in nature, learning how to breathe, doing an internet search for Terence McKenna, and a little help from psychedelics if you have the means. Know that your courage will be tested at every moment, and awareness will frustratingly leave you when you feel like you need it the most.

Breathe through that shit.

Face what you are afraid to face in your mind and your mind will be set ablaze, your spirit will flow, your body will beat with new rhythms, and just like that you’ll get it. And all that depression, all that violent negative shit you masochistically torture yourself with upstairs will fall away like magic. Alakazam!

If you should choose then to let go of desire, to let the world come to you, to accept, to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to have gratitude in the moment, well, then you might find yourself feeling like a god amongst common people. But then you come to learn you are equal to all, even to the smallest and most fragile, and you are just in a different place than them, different positions on a path. One may learn to the benefit of all, to always error towards humility, to work to help those who face the same struggles you have in ways that actually help them and are not colored with the shadow of selfish intent. These are truths beyond illusion.

The gaslighting must be unraveled before the shame and punishment systems truly come crumbling to the ground. To break the illusion we must at every moment hold in the forefront of our minds that this is but a chosen system elites have put us in and it does not have to be this way. Things can change quickly if we can find a new spell to cast, one we choose together instead of one chosen for us by a select few who hold illegitimate power.

Always remember, the centralized economic systems, the politicians, the corporations, the banks, and the organized religions are all tools of control in a social hierarchy. These tools of control are put there intentionally to curve your decision making to do what they want you to do, which is make them more powerful. These elites have quite the arrogance to suggest they know better than you, than philosophers, shamans, ecologists, biologists, climatologists, artists, artisans, the lovers, the dreamers, and me; to put it in amphibian terms.

They believe they know better out of convenience to them because if they know better that means ever so coincidentally they grow more powerful, with more money, more stuff, and better looking people to use sexually. Their success is not symbiotic, though, as their success means the exploitation of everything else in existence so they can just take more for themselves.

Never forget, even when we are forced to operate within this system and they put that saddle on you, do not be broken. To quote Margaret Attwood’s words from The Handmaid’s Tale, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

Know the illusion is a game being played with an malevolent intent, and work to bring the underlying truth into the forefront of the conscious mind and the illusion will break. Refuse to be led around by coercions of money or any other control system that attempts to cage humanity or your consciousness while simultaneously wrecking the natural world. The entire earth is now speaking to us in very direct terms, showing us that the way we are living is wrong. Every feedback mechanism screams this way of living is not healthy for body, mind, spirit, flora or fauna. We can change it, but it takes belief in better.

Free your minds. Free the Earth. May it be so.