If you want to truly live free, you have to first recognize the things that are preventing you from doing that. Life isn’t what it used to be. Being born in our day and age is a lot different than being born 5000 years ago.
Back then, you were born, rinsed off in a river, and grew up learning how to work and hunt. Now when you are born, you are assigned a social insurance number, you have a government authorized birth certificate, you are piled on with cultural programs, launched into a public education system, and you are brainwashed into conforming with societal expectations.
The “Matrix” is a combination of philosophies, ideas, institutions, societal structures, and agendas that are keeping blinds pulled over our eyes preventing us from seeing our life for what it really is. Some people are so deeply invested into the Matrix that they think it is who and what they are.
Here is a list of 5 grand illusions that are keeping humanity enslaved to the matrix. If you want to break free, you first have to learn what it is you need to break free from. After reading this article, you will see clearly that the world we live in is a big Matrix designed to keep us asleep.
1) The illusions of choice and freedom
Your government may tell you that you are free, but what happens when you try to grow a certain type of plant to use for medicinal or recreational purposes? How can you be free if you live in a society that has made plants that grow in nature illegal?
Did you know that some people have been arrested for growing their own gardens, and community gardens have been shut down because they conflict with the interests of big business? That’s right. According to a news report from a few years ago, a man from Georgia was sued by his county for $5000 for growing too many of his own vegetables…
You can be fined for peeing in a forest or for walking around without a shirt on. Your phone calls can be recorded at any time. Your internet search is monitored. Your emails can be accessed by Intelligence at any time. If you say one wrong thing about the president, the CIA may show up at your door the next day.
In some states, you aren’t even allowed to film public servants (police officers) for your own protection. You are not free. You are free within a very narrow scope of behaviour that has been prescribed to you by the 1% that runs our planet.
2) The political system
Do you think your votes actually matter? Votes would only matter if you lived in a democracy, but according to a recent study from Princeton University, the United States is an obligarchy. This means its laws and policies are shaped around the interests of corporations and the economic elite, instead of being shaped around the desires and wellbeing of the citizens.
After reviewing almost 1800 policies and laws within the US, the peer-reviewed study says: “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
When people run for president, who do you think funds their campaigns? Here is a list of the institutions that funded the campaign of Barack Obama during the 2012 election:
- 19 million dollars from communications/electronics
- 2.5 million from energy and natural resources
- 21 million from finance and insurance
- 28.2 million from lobbyists and lawyers
- 19 million from health
The list goes on and on. If someone from Goldman Sachs walks up to Obama and says “Here is a 10 million dollar check. Good luck on your campaign this year 
“, are we really naive enough to think that laws won’t be constructed in favour of that business? The day I’ll vote is the day people start wearing NASCAR uniforms when they run for office so everyone can see the business and corporations that have sponsored them.
Our leaders serve the 1%, are funded by the 1%, and are puppets to the 1%. Going down to the local vote center with your family and choosing between which head of the two-headed dragon you want to be enslaved by does not make a difference. We are being ruled by greedy, power-hungry sociopaths who are destroying the planet, go to war for profit, and suppress the God-given rights of citizens.
3) The education system
School teaches you how to memorize, repeat, and regurgitate. Just the skillset that is needed to spend your life working for someone else’s dreams. With ‘writing’ being a subject which is currently being taken out of schools, emphasis is being put more on memorization of knowledge and less on creativity and comprehension.
A few years ago when I was in university for Philosophy, I got a taste of how education SHOULD be. The arts is the only thing that restored my faith in the school system because it encouraged critical thinking, the organization of thought, and creativity. All of my other non-philosophy classes didn’t care about how much you knew about any given topic. They would just give you a few multiple choice tests each semester to see if you could repeat what you had read.
The system is designed like this. Go through school, don’t push the boundaries, memorize and repeat, get good grades, get a degree, and then land a “job” where you are an employee for someone else your whole life.
What do Oprah, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Tiger Woods, Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Edison all have in common? They are all extremely successful icons (some are millionaires and billionaires), and none of them have a college degree. In fact, about half of them dropped out of high school.
Here is a list of 100 successful entrepreneurs who all millionaires and billionaires that dropped out of college or high school. School doesn’t teach you to find your passion, develop your own talents, or develop your own identity. It doesn’t even teach you how to pay taxes, buy a house, raise a family, or pay your bills. It simply prepares you to work for someone else until you die.
4) The “pursuit of happiness”
This is a dead-end pursuit because we are brainwashed by marketing, advertising, and propaganda to think that happiness comes in the form of material possessions. We then spend our whole lives trying to win the rat race without every stopping to reflect on what “happiness” really entails.
Loving relationships. Spirituality. Nature. Meditation. Reflection. A relationship with God. Self-discovery and personal development. Self-realization. Living in the present moment. Emotional/mental mastery. These are the things that comprise happiness, yet we are taught that getting a job, marrying a partner, buying a house, and raising kids is how we become happy. If this was the case, then why do half of all marriages end in divorce? Why is suicide the 10th leading cause of death in America? Why is depression, anxiety, and mental illness at an all time high?
We are born into a hollow society that is designed to keep us media-obsessed consumers who buy things we don’t need to fill a void that has only been created due to the emptiness of the society in the first place. When you get taught about “the pursuit of happiness”, what they really mean to say is “the pursuit of material gain”.
5) Ideologies, religions, and culture
You’re not an American. You are not a Muslim. You are not a businessman, a humanitarian, a German, a Christian, a conservative, or a middle-class citizen. All of these things are unnatural titles that have been prescribed to you and exist superficially to your natural state of pure being in this moment.
For example, you may ask someone “Who are you?”. They may respond with “I am a right-wing neo-conservative American businessman with a degree in economics.” They are confusing the formless identity of their own soul with their social labels as they relate to the Matrix.
Your beliefs. Your heritage. Your political stance. Your religion. Your job title. Your diet. Your culture. All of these things you learned. They were taught to you by society, and you most likely carry these things around with you as a part of your identity. It’s only natural to identify with certain titles, but consider this.
If you got hit on the head with a rock and suffered from amnesia, you wouldn’t remember anything about your socially-constructed identity. You would still exist, but now you would exist within the present moment in a state of pure being. You would be more “you” then you have ever been in your life. When your soul is no longer piled on with all of this cultural fluff, you begin to see the world and yourself through a clear set of eyes.
Your spirit doesn’t care about any of those titles, names, labels, or cultural viewpoints. Neither does God or the Universe. One of the biggest parts of living with a Matrix is that there is a massive confusion of self-identity, and a feeling of distance from your true self.
Who am I? You feel like something is missing, because instead of feeding your spirit, you have been taught to acquire a new label in an attempt to provide yourself with a sense of meaning and worth. The Matrix has not only taken over our way of life, it is now starting to infiltrate our own sense of individuality. The best way to break free from the influence the Matrix has on your sense of identity is to meditate. The more still you become, the more you will see.
Breaking free
Create art. Meditate. Soul-search. Study philosophy. Do independent research. Follow your dreams, your heart, and your passion. Read articles and blogs from websites that give you new perspectives. Get to know yourself. Do things that make you feel alive. Once you discover yourself, you begin to see through the veil of deception and you are no longer mentally or spiritually enslaved to the Matrix or its ideologies.
Every single person reading this has the power to change the world for the better. You are more than a gear in the machine of capitalism, and your identity is much grander than your social insurance number and job title.
You are the focal point at which the Universe becomes self-aware and experiences human form. You are connected to all things in creation. The Matrix wants to keep us asleep to the illusion of separateness because it makes us fight with each other instead of fighting against the people who have been enslaving us.
All of these 5 grand illusions are designed to dis-empower you, dumb you down, enslave you, and keep you a happiness-chasing consumer. You are a soul with infinite potential, free will, purpose, and creative insight. Don’t let the Matrix consume you.
“5 Grand Illusions That Keep Us Enslaved To The Matrix” by Steven Bancarz, not dated, at https://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/5-grand-illusions-that-keep-us-enslaved-to-the-matrix/
Original link: 5 Grand Illusions That Keep Us Enslaved To The Matrix