The Ultimate Conspiracy Revealed
It’s
a trip how much mental energy people pour into arguments about world
affairs while devoting almost none to the way their understanding and
perception of those affairs is happening.
People
will happily argue day in and day out about what political ideology is
most correct or what should be done about a given problem, but it’s rare
for them to turn around and examine the sources of information that
they’ve used to form those opinions. The fact that most of the
information being circulated about what’s going on in the world is owned
by plutocrats who undeniably have a vested interest in maintaining the
status quo rarely enters into mainstream awareness. Which is of course
by design.
Even
less common than people questioning the nature of the information
they’ve received is for them to examine what happens to that information
once it gets into their heads. Nearly everyone lives a life that is
dominated by nonstop compulsive mental chatter which determines
everything from one’s emotional state to how their interest and
attention moves, thereby creating cognitive biases and perceptual filters
which shape how all future information will be interpreted. For most of
us, thought serves not as the useful tool we evolved it to be, but as
the writer, director and star of the entire show. As Ecknath Easwaran
once said, “we don’t think our thoughts, our thoughts think us.”
Rarer
even than examining the nature of thought is examining the nature of
consciousness itself. From cradle to grave none of us ever experience a
single thing that is outside our own field of consciousness, but almost
everyone goes that whole time without ever seriously looking into the
nature of that field for themselves. Which is a shame, because a bit of
rigorous investigation reveals that our entire conscious experience is
happening in a very different way than the consensus worldview assumes.
Most
of us labor under the assumption that we are a finite, physical body
moving around in world from which we are separate, and against which we
must protect and secure ourselves. Some dedicated self inquiry reveals
that it’s far more accurate to say that what you are is not a body or a
mind or a separate “me” at all, but rather a kind of strange,
imperceptible subject to which the field of consciousness appears. In
your actual experience without referring to mental narrative, you can
discover a clear distinction between this ineffable subject and your
field of consciousness, and see lucidly that if you’re going to identify
as anything, it only makes sense to identify as that ineffable subject.
If
you think it’s mind-blowing to launch an investigation into the source
of the world’s problems and discover a covert alliance of plutocrats,
intelligence agencies and domestic propagandists, wait until you launch
an investigation into the source of your own suffering and discover that
“you” don’t even exist at all. You chase
the white rabbit down twisting funhouse-mirror rabbit holes, finally
discover the secret chamber of your tormenter, spin his desk chair
around to face you, and find not the rabbit, nor the devil, nor even
yourself, but an empty chair.
That’s
the real red pill, right there. That’s the ultimate conspiracy
revealed. Not that there’s a secret cabal controlling world affairs to
ensure world domination, but that there’s ultimately no one in the
driver’s seat at all. Some clever primates with robust egoic structures
have figured out how to manipulate things, but they themselves are just
like the rest of us: empty processes playing themselves out for no one,
just like a fire or a waterfall. We all conspired to tell a story about a
bunch of separate selves who simply do not exist outside of the story.
And
in this sense our impulse to expose the ultimate conspiracy to solve
our world’s problems once and for all is a perfectly healthy one. Those
efforts don’t have the end result that most of us are anticipating, but
if enough people pursue those efforts to their end it will indeed solve
all our problems. The ego is an illusion held in place by the mistaken
belief that there exists some hard, tangible object that can be
accurately labeled “me” or “mine”, and ego also happens to be the thing
that the propagandists use to hold the status quo in place.
Without the illusion that there exists a non-conceptual self who must
be protected and secured from a separate world, the propagandists cannot
propagandize, because their only tools are narrative, fear, and greed.
Awakening from the illusion of ego makes people immune to illusory
narratives, fear and greed, which means awakening on a large scale will
make them impossible to propagandize, at which time we can use the power
of our numbers to expunge the status quo.
But
we’ve got to wake up first. We’ve got to stop overlooking the most
important and fundamental aspects of our experience here. Self-inquiry
is a powerful tool that can be used to investigate the nature of self
and consciousness in a way that can lead relatively quickly to
self-realization. Just do a search for the term and find your own approach to it if this is something which interests you.
Once
you’ve resolved this fundamental matter, the illusion of ego is no
longer there to disturb your natural state of equanimity and prevent you
from using thought as the useful tool it’s meant to be. You can pick up
stories, concepts and identities and use them to the extent that they
are useful, and then put them down once they’re not. But please remember
that the ultimate goal in discovering the ultimate conspiracy is not to
just know it, but to solve the world’s problems. Don’t be content with
self-knowledge, carry it out into the world and use your newfound inner
peace and lucid relationship with concepts to help make this planet a
better place to live on.
Happy rabbit holing.
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