“Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself?” — Ecclesiastes 7:16
So you just learned about the Gulf of Tonkin and the Magic Bullet. Or, maybe you just discovered that MI6 falsified the documents that got us into WW2. You read your first book about Operation Paperclip or Operation Northwoods. Perhaps somebody told you about MK Ultra. You recently saw a YouTube video about how a certain something might’ve been made in a lb.
You’re “waking up.” Realizing that the world is not what you thought and not at all what it seems.
Congrats.
If you’re like most folks the initial shock and horror of these revelations will soon give way to an almost evangelistic intensity. Other people have to know you will think. They just have to. They’ve been lied to, frauded, and used and abused for decades. They’ve been robbed. Experimented on. Thrown into senseless wars. And you will know it. You’ll be able to prove it. You’ll have the documents. All the evidence, right there. PDFs on your hard drive. Journal articles. Videos filled with candid admissions from politicians and scientists and educators. You’ll have the receipts. They’ll believe you, you will think. You’ll be the one to finally wake people up.
Ah.
But, instead.
You’ll find that everybody just hates you.
What gives?
If you’re new to conspiracy culture let me save you some time. You ain’t waking up nobody. Sorry. Many before you have tried and all of them have failed. Why? Because truth, “The Red Pill”, is poison. People don’t want poison.
The harsh reality is that most people are not and will never be ready to leave the matrix. The red pill for them would be like a chemo drug. Sure, it’ll kill some of the psychic cancers ailing you but you just might die in the process. This will be hard for you to accept. It’s hard for everyone who “wakes up” to accept. You thought people would want to know the truth. You were wrong. The illusions are part of the world as it is and most people like the world as it is. Moreover, you yourself are still plugged into the matrix on deeper levels that you aren’t yet aware of. We all are. Until we are literally glowing with inner light we are, each of us, operating under some deception or lie of Evil. That’s just the nature of things. So long as you’re here, on earth, you’re never going to be fully free.
I mean, sure, in theory it’s possible to “jack out” completely. You know, overcome all the illusions and evils of this world and ascend to heaven in a chariot of fire or a ball of light or some-such. I think that happens. Rare, but it’s a thing. Some men and women, while still alive, become so attached to the Divine that they just sort of phase out of reality. Or, what we call reality at any rate. I think St. Paul was right on the cusp of doing so. He spoke of being called up to “the third heaven” and then coming back down. Elsewhere he went on to argue with himself about whether it was better to stay in the body to help others know Christ or to leave the body and be with Christ right then. He could’ve probably phased out any time he wanted. Just asked and, you know, chariot of fire or something like that.
Westerners who go to India to study with a guru are often shocked by the behavior of their holy man. You know, they spend six months in an ashram watching their teacher hold padmasana for thirty-five hours and eat nothing but lentils for a month and they think, “Golly gee, now here is a man of the spirit!” And then a few months later they find out he has a girlfriend or cat calls women on the street or that he smokes cigarettes. They feel frauded! How could he!
Ah. But, “No, no, no,” say the other yogis. “The guru has to have a vice here and there you know. Otherwise he’d simply disappear. Dematerialize. Without that sin he’d just melt away and become pure spirit.”
Maybe. I don’t know but I do find it interesting that that exact thing seemed to be going on with Paul. Famously he wrote that he had a “thorn in the flesh” he couldn’t overcome. Some sort of sin perhaps. Three times he asked God to remove it but each time God said no. “My grace is sufficient,” God would say. Who knows. Maybe that thorn was to anchor him here. Keep him grounded, as it were. Without it, maybe he would have simply dematerialized into the aether.
And that’s the thing of it. If you want to exist in a fallen world, you have to remain fallen in some way. If you aren’t, like Jesus wasn’t, they’ll have to remove you from the world in another fashion.
Likewise, if everybody “woke up” tomorrow we’d all die.
And here by “die” I don’t mean we’d all transcend this mortal coil and become light beings or something I mean the economy would collapse, there’d be riots, people would starve, and bombs would go off.
Why?
Because this world, all of this world, is held together by illusions.
And here’s the thing. It’s simply not your right to take someone else’s illusions away. That’s a form of stealing. Like waking a man up and robbing him of his dreams. People need their illusions. Be not cavalier in tearing them down.
Listen.
A man had his servants go out into his fields to sow. Good seed. Grain. Vegetables. Maybe some gourds and so on. But then at night an enemy came and leapt over the walls of the field and sowed bad seed. Weeds. Thorns and tares. When the harvest approached the servants went to survey the fields. Coming unto their master they said, “Master, did we not sow good seed? Wherefore come these weeds?” “An enemy has done this,” replied the master. “Shall we go and pull up the weeds?” The servants asked. “No,” replied the master. “By now the weeds and wheat are grown up together and tangled, tangled down to the roots. Pulling up the weeds would also pull up much of the wheat and you would kill it by doing so. Let both grow together until harvest. Then we will separate them out.”
And so it is.
Right now there’s a woman somewhere whose son died in Afghanistan. Blown up at nineteen years old by a roadside bomb. In her soul she copes with this by telling herself that her son was a hero fighting to free an oppressed people from terrorists. It was a brutal patriarchy or something like that. Their women needed to go to college and be free of the hijab. He was there to give them democracy. The vote. His death was noble. For a good cause.
Okay.
Who are you to rob her of this fancy?
Of course, we are all friends here. Anyone reading this blog is doing so voluntarily. We all know the War on Terror was nonsense that served no purpose. There were no WMDs and the people in Afghanistan actually wanted Sharia law and blasphemy laws and hijabs. The U.S. was in the Middle East mostly to control its oil and its opium. That’s what her son really died for. Trade routes.
Are you going to tell her that?
In like fashion I think a fair number of my readers are probably in agreement with me that the moon landing is, at a minimum, fishy as hell. Be that as it may, for many people the dream of space is as close as their imagination can get to hoping for something like Heaven. They need it. Gets them through the day to play pretend that one day they’ll be in Star Fleet or something. Soon modern medicine will cure death and they’ll have robot arms and bionic eyes. Their consciousness will be uploaded to a computer!
That’s as close as they can get to hoping for eternal life.
Let them have it.
Are these illusions damaging. Yeah. Sure. It’s no good when a population is so easily manipulated into wars or lockdowns or hating people because of the color of their skin. I think anyone who believed we might have collectively learned something from the failure in Afghanistan has been thoroughly rebuffed by how easy it was to whip up a new frenzy of blood lust against the Russians. How quickly the public cheered for World War 3. Nobody learns anything. They don’t want to. Learning would be admitting they were fooled in the past and that’s painful. It would mean realizing that they had blown up a bunch of brown people in the desert for nothing. That they cheered on war crimes. That they were the baddies and that their sons died for nothing.
That’s hard to hear ain’t it?
It is. Thankfully, it’s not your job to tell them.
See, everybody’s lives are full of good things tangled up with bad things. Wheat tangled up with weeds. Yeah, in an ideal world we would just have the wheat but that’s not where we are right now. If you pretend it is and try to rip the weeds out of other people’s lives you’re going to hurt them.
And that’s why they won’t like you.
That’s why conspiracy theorists get a bad name.
We all need our delusions. Think of all the guilt people would suffer if they really, truly woke up to what they’d done to themselves and others in the name of covid. Horrifying. They’d never recover. most of them will never face that truth because it would kill them and that’s okay. You have to learn that that’s okay. God’s grace is sufficient. For Paul and for them too. One day, at the harvest, all those falsehoods, lies, and illusions will be held to account, thrown away, and burned. One day all those weeds will be pulled up.
But not today.
Try it now and you’ll just pull up the wheat as well.
That’s not to say you should go along with the lies. No. I think those who know the truth have a responsibility to try and live it. If we do, then, when others are ready, they will come to us and ask us to relieve them of their lies. When they’re ready though. You can’t force it if they don’t want it. You can’t bully people into the truth.
Frankly, that’s why I see value in the postconciliar Church and the softer, more tolerant approach it has adopted since the 60s. Much as it pains me to say it, for a population as far gone as ours Truth is almost deadly. Limp wristed as it sounds, in a sense you really do have to “meet people where they’re at.” If most people today were made to truly feel the weight of their sins they’d collapse. So then advocates of traditional religion (Traditional Catholics, Primitive Baptists, and so on) are right but they’re also wrong. The religion they’re pushing for is truer and more correct than the popular versions. Yes. But it’s also a religion for a stronger people. A people of the past. Wanting to force it on modern man is like trying to force a man who’s never lifted before to squat six hundred pounds. Won’t work. He’s just going to die. He’s not going to get closer to Jesus or become more holy or more enlightened. He’s just going to get crushed and die.
“They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.” — Jesus
So, here I am. A guy who hands out red pills. I used to try to give them to friends and to family. To anyone who I thought would listen really. Because I believed it was vital that people knew the truth. I thought they deserved to know that all these narratives that controlled their lives were not real. I believed I was doing them a service. Freeing them from the bondage of sin and shame.
They only got mad at me. That’s all that ever happened.
And, in hindsight, they were right to do so. I was pulling up weeds attached firmly to other things they held dear. Good things. I was, in effect, killing parts of them. Parts they wanted to keep. So I don’t do that anymore.
I still hand out red pills. That’s my role in life. But you have to seek me out for them. You have to want them. No more door-to-door soliciting. I’m not going to come on Facebook and try to convince you that you’re actually not guilty of racism just for having white skin or that you don’t actually need to wear a mask or have an overly strong opinion on Donald Trump or Ukraine. I’m not going come and try to wake you up from the dream you’re having. Why should I? Maybe it’s a good one. You want to #Kony2012 it all the way to the bank? You go girl. You need to put a rainbow flag over an effigy of George Floyd? Have at it. Those are delusions that I’ve seen through but which you still need. Maybe you’ve seen through some others that I’m still keen on. Who knows?
You don’t pull up my favorite weeds. I won’t pull up yours.
My husband likes to say "Weeds always grow where they're needed." I assumed it was because he doesn't like weeding the garden, but maybe he's onto something...
Terrific piece, Yoshi! I love the "weeds and wheat" analogy (parable?) , particularly because it reminds us all to be patient with one another. Which is so effing hard right now. :-)