Thursday, January 22, 2009

The Red Pill or the Blue Pill? Which will you take?

In the Matrix, which pill would you take, the red or the blue?

I reason for this posting is to help those that have found themselves here understand the nature of why they were directed here.

You are here because what your about to explore is beyond the box of ordinary ways of thinking. That said... Read on if you will at the risk that reality as you have known it may never be the same....

The question of which pill to take illustrates the personal aspect of the decision to study philosophy. Do you live on in ignorance (and potentially bliss) or do you lead what Aristotle called 'the examined life'...

The Matrix is a film filled with religious and philosophical symbolism. The plot supposes that humans live in vats many years in the future, being fed false sensory information by a giant virtual reality computer (the Matrix). The perpetrators of this horror are machines of the future who use humans as a source of power. Humans are literally farmed.

The central character of the film, Neo, is presented to us in the opening part of the film as a loner who is searching for a mysterious character called Morpheus (named after the Greek god of dreams and sleep). He is also trying to discover the answer to the question "What is the Matrix?"

Morpheus contacts Neo just as the machines (posing as sinister 'agents') are trying to keep Neo from finding out any more. When Morpheus and Neo meet, Morpheus offers Neo two pills. The red pill will answer the question "what is the Matrix?" (by removing him from it) and the blue pill simply for life to carry on as before. As Neo reaches for the red pill Morpheus warns Neo "Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

The film as a whole and especially the choosing scene is deeply compelling. Why is the choice between what you believe you know and an unknown 'real' truth so fascinating? How could a choice possibly be made? On the one hand everyone you love and everything that you have built you life upon. One the other the promise only of truth.

The question then is not about pills, but what they stand for in these circumstances. The question is asking us whether reality, truth, is worth pursuing. The blue pill will leave us as we are, in a life consisting of habit, of things we believe we know. We are comfortable, we do not need truth to live. The blue pill symbolises commuting to work every day, or brushing your teeth.
The red pill is an unknown quantity. We are told that it can help us to find the truth. We don't know what that truth is, or even that the pill will help us to find it. The red pill symbolises risk, doubt and questioning. In order to answer the question, you can gamble your whole life and world on a reality you have never experienced.

However, in order to investigate which course of action to take we need to investigate why the choice is faced. Why should we even have to decide whether to pursue truth?

The answer in short, is inquisitiveness. Many people throughout human existence have questioned and inquired. Most of them have not been scientists or doctors or philosophers, but simply ordinary people asking 'what if?' or 'why?' Asking these questions ultimately leads us to a choice. Do you continue to ask and investigate, or do you stop and never ask again? This in essence, is the question posed to Neo in the film.

So what are the advantages of taking the blue pill? As one of the characters in the film says, "ignorance is bliss" Essentially, if the truth is unknown, or you believe that you know the truth, what is there to question or worry about?

By accepting what we are told and experience life can be easier. There is the social pressure to 'fit in', which is immensely strong in most cultures. Questioning the status quo carries the danger of ostracism, possibly persecution. This aspect has a strong link with politics. People doing well under the current system are not inclined to look favorably on those who question the system. Morpheus says to Neo "You have to understand that many people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."

The system also has a place for you, an expected path to follow. This removes much of the doubt and discomfort experienced by a trailblazer.

Another argument on the side of the blue pill is how does anyone know that the status quo is not in fact the truth? The act of simply questioning does not infer a lack of validity on the questioned. Why not assume that your experience is innocent until proven guilty? Just accept everything?

So if the arguments for the blue pill are so numerous, why take the red pill? Why pursue truth even though it may be unpalatable and the journey to it hard? In the film, Neo risks death to escape the virtual reality and discovers a brutal reality from which he cannot return. As he discovers the trouble with asking questions is that the answers are not necessarily what you want to hear.

To justify taking the red pill we might ask what is the purpose of an ignorant existence? Further still, what is there in merely existing? Simply existing brings humans down to the level of objects; they might have utility or even purpose, but where is the meaning? Existence without meaning is surely not living your life, but just experiencing it. As Trinity says to Neo, "The Matrix cannot tell you who you are."

Given the potential disadvantages of choosing the red pill, the motivation for discovering the truth must then be very strong. The film makes much of this point. Trinity says to Neo "It's the question that drives us, Neo." and Morpheus compares the motivation for Neo's search to "a splinter in your mind - driving you mad." The motivation for answering the question is obviously strong as the answer will help us to find the meaning in our lives.

What we are looking at here is the drive to answer a question, but the key to this is what drove the question in the first place. The asking of questions about our environment our experience and ourselves is fundamental to the human condition. Children ask a seemingly never-ending stream of questions from an early age. It is only with education and socialization that some people stop asking these questions. However, we remain, as it were, hard-wired to inquire.

This is an inevitable consequence of consciousness. A being with a mind, conscious of itself and its existence, experiencing a reality, needs to organize the data that it receives from its senses. Simply observing and recording does not allow for consciousness. It is what we do with that information that allows us to think. In order to process and store the vast amount of information received, the human brain attempts to identify patterns in the data; looking for the patterns behind what is experienced. This is asking questions of the sensory information, and requires reasoning. By definition a conscious mind seeks to know. Knowing something requires more than just data, but intelligence or reasoning applied to that data. To attempt to obtain knowledge we must therefore question the data our mind receives; thus, consciousness questions.

So the metaphor of the journey to truth that Neo takes is complete. The journey starts with a question, there is a search for the answer and the answer may be reached. This shows us that the journey does not start with Neo choosing between the pills, or with ourselves deciding whether to question. The act of asking the question is itself the starting point as the aim of asking the question is to seek truth and knowledge.

We have established that consciousness is aware and seeks knowledge and that thus the conscious mind must question. To question is to seek the truth and start on the journey to knowledge. Therefore the choice between the pills is surely made for us. The fact that we are conscious appears to require us to take the red pill.
However, this can be simply countered by someone who would prefer to take the blue pill. They may wish to seek the truth in a different way, or in a less mind jarring set of circumstances. They can choose the blue pill and not deny their consciousness, but to stop seeking the truth entirely would be to deny their consciousness.

Thus we are philosophically driven to seek the truth and the act of questioning whether to seek it is in itself seeking the truth. As conscious minds we will always seek the truth. However, the choice over the red or blue pills is not solely a choice between whether to question or not, it is a personal choice on the method of discovering the truth.

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Thursday, January 15, 2009

My Wealth is the Richness of my Relationships!

I grew up a quiet and shy kid who secretly always wanted friends to play with but had bought into the adult message (or curse) of kids should be seen and not heard.

I spent many decade bumping up against the invisible glass wall and ceiling I imposed upon myself not knowing how I created nor perpetuated this walking, riding, running prison of isolation I lived within.

This points to the nature of our decisions. In a moment we can give life to a train of thought that can change every aspect of our lives for decades or even an entire lifetime.

So how important are the quality of our thoughts? Even more important is how we feel at the time we focus on those thoughts!

If we sow the seeds of fear, lack, inability, fear of anything we literally put up a firewall in that area of our lives to keep out what we really want.

How sad?

Well, the good news is that just as it only take a moment of intense feeling about any thought to lock it into "Cellular Memory" (Try stubbing your toe, look at your thoughts about it and notice how you really begin to make an effort to avoid situations that might mean opportunities to stub you toe!)

It's also that easy to undo "blocks or blind spot" where our lives have become blocked or frozen.

If you are aware that you have self sabataging patterns or things you've been working on changeing about your behavior, perceptions or feelings but they keep returning back to the old reactionary pattern I can show you how to break them once and for all.

More to come! Time to go our for a barefoot run!

OK, I'm back...

Most associate the brain as being the source of memory when in truth every cell in our body is a part of the almost infinite "harddrive" that last a whole lifetime. That's called "Cellular Memory".

Cellular Memory begins at the moment of our creation in the union of a sperm and a egg believe it or not! That means every experience you have ever been exposed to for every second of your entire life is recorded in every cell of your whole body.

I went through a training back in the late 1980's revolving around the identification of, testing for and correction of Dyslexia's that involved the use of the body's muscles and nerve circuits via the science of Kinisiology.

The most profound thing about this training was in order to become certified to by work with private clients and qualify to teach to other professionals who wanted to help dyslexics I had to be tested at each stage of learning process and when "stress induced blind spots" where found; they had to "cleared" or unblocked.

I was astounded that so many of what I thought were "no big deal" and unrelated events along my time line of growing up and things that I experienced or happened as an adult had actual measureable impact on things like my sense of balance, coordination, depth perception, hearing, vision, caused me to alter my posture, weakened or shut off various nerve and muscle groups and pathways, even my perceptions and ability to recall were full of holes.

Every moment of our lives is a "Learning Moment" and without much conscious analysis we make decisions about what things mean, how we felt about that event, thought, person, sound, taste, touch, smell, etc. and depending on whether it was deemed a good or empowering feeling or a bad and disempowering feeling we lock that down into cellular memory so we know how we prefer to deal with similar situations in the future. Those future decisions will be based on feed back from your five senses.
If it looks like, feels like, sounds like, smells like, taste like, it must be like! From there will begin behaviors that either move us towards or away from what we believe in the outer world is that group of decisions!

So how do you break those "Re - Actions" (and by the way your Re - Actions can come in many forms. Examples: severe reaction to bee stings, allergies, hives, if your an athlete; favoring injury of a certain body part or side of the body over and over again, in ability to comprehend things you read or recall them after reading, self sabatage patterns in relationships or work, compulsive, obsessive or addictive behavior, phobias to name a few.

There is a very technical way to unravel all these patterns that I was taught and worked with for years. I will spare you the long version and share with you a means I have found to cut through all that and is much more effective and gentle:

What ever the problem appears to be as a symptom in present time go somewhere quiet and where you feel safe to close your eyes for a few minutes uninterupted.

Once there... Close your eyes and go back to the earliest time you can recall the beginning of the present time symptoms or feelings associated with the symptoms.

Remember as much of what each of your five senses percieved at that time as you can.

Then knowing what you know today and the price you paid for making the decisions you made back then about that event or time in your life ask Jesus to take over responsibility for the path of carnage you have suffered to date as the result of your thoughts and feelings you locked down at the age of cause.

Obviously, those decisions about how to think, feel and behave from that point forward costed you something or maybe even someone!

That's because those memories were never intended to be saved. They were intended to make you stronger, more tender, more understanding, to build you not to harm you.

You must give them up. Giving them up to maker of the entire Universe is actually very reasonable. After all God's heart is big enough to heal anything and contains all things... Ultimately for your very own benifit.

Don't believe me? Try it... What do you have to lose? You know what you've got to lose!

The decision is yours and yours alone. He is waiting....

Lord, I offer up to you today the baggage I've carried all these years that does not belong to me. Does not serve my becoming closer to you and living the life you brought me into this world to walk out.
Lord, I cannot shoulder this stuff any longer but I know your shoulders carry the whole world. Take this burden and do with it what you will. Allow me to move on to the next level of becoming more of what you will for my life Lord.

Give thanks for what you have learned in how life here on the Earth works and wait patiently for a sense of lightness to come over you.

God Speed

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Monday, January 12, 2009

New Technology to Maximize Your Ability to Adapt to the Stress of Running and Life!

Ever wonder if your maximizing your genetic potential?

I know I have for decades!

I spent over $130 mo for decades to make sure I fed my body every possible nutrient it needed to adapt to everything I exposed it to.

I knew I got some benefit from the mix of vitamins, minerals, herbs and enzymes I concocted daily but I also knew that I peed a lot of them out, didn't always get what I needed and OD-ed on some nutrients and usually had little idea which or what I consumed that caused anything from rashes, to dry skin, to tender skin, swelling, joint pain, fluid retention, loss of thirst, loss of appetite, to name a few symptoms.

For years I've told many that someday a company would show up that could look at one's genetic make up and custom tailor nutrition that was perfect to what that persons unique DNA required for optimal function and to support maximally perfect cell replication or regeneration.

Recently I was made aware that such a company does just this and is available to anyone who wants to get the most out of their body's potential whether it's perfect adaption to running, work, workouts, family stress or any other force the body and it's occupant has to adapt to!

Email me at NextLevelMentor at GMail dot com for links to one click videos about this!

This is an idea who's time has come! Or look me up on https://www.facebook.com/LandSurfingFrugan

New Technology to Maximize Your Ability to Adapt to the Stress of Running and Life!

Ever wonder if your maximizing your genetic potential?

I know I have for decades!

I spent over $130 mo for decades to make sure I fed my body every possible nutrient it needed to adapt to everything I exposed it to.

I knew I got some benefit from the mix of vitamins, minerals, herbs and enzymes I concocted daily but I also knew that I peed a lot of them out, didn't always get what I needed and OD-ed on some nutrients and usually had little idea which or what I consumed that caused anything from rashes, to dry skin, to tender skin, swelling, joint pain, fluid retention, loss of thirst, loss of appetite, to name a few symptoms.

For years I've told many that someday a company would show up that could look at one's genetic make up and custom tailor nutrition that was perfect to what that persons unique DNA required for optimal function and to support maximally perfect cell replication or regeneration.

Recently I was made aware that such a company does just this and is available to anyone who wants to get the most out of their body's potential whether it's perfect adaption to running, work, workouts, family stress or any other force the body and it's occupant has to adapt to!

Email me at NextLevelMentor at GMail dot com for links to one click videos about this!

This is an idea who's time has come! Or look me up on www.FaceBook.com Erskien Lenier