Storytellers: Escape the Matrix!

Hi, Steve Barnes here with today's edition of Life Writing Live. As always, if you enjoy these talks, be sure to share them. That's how we know that you like it. Today's is kind of special. I'm taking off on a trip tomorrow. And as always, whenever I take off on a trip, I'm aware that certain elements of that trip are out of my control and things can happen. And it hits me that I want to try to make a statement, something that if something were to happen to me, it would be a statement of my thinking at a particular point in my life. So today's is more involved than my usual talks are. And because of that, you're going to see my eyes going up on the screen where I have written my thoughts. And so I'm going to go back and forth between reading thoughts I've written and spinning with it because there's a lot to be said today and the theme is escaping the Matrix. One thing that's kind of interesting, and I don't know exactly whether or not this is going to fit in with everything else I'm saying, but first of all, all three Matrix movies are not of equal quality. We all know this. The first one, I think, is fantastic. The second and the third fall down considerably. But there's one thing that's kind of interesting in that Neo's fighting abilities and magical abilities that work in the Matrix don't work the same way in the real world. That the physics of the Matrix are not the same as the physics in the real world. The sociology of the Matrix is not the same as the sociology of the real world. And they make that comparison. And this is one of the reasons why it's hard for people to wake up. That their power and their glory, their influence within the artificial construction that was created by individuals and human beings and societies is not the same once you wake up. So it can be painful. Like I said, I don't know if that connects directly, but between the time that I wrote this little essay and the time that I started recording this, that occurred to me. Okay, here we go. It's interesting to see that people who claim to have a belief in equality between human groups will actually make statements or accept logic chains that lead in the opposite direction. And I suspect this is a conflict between the head and the heart, between intellect, knowledge and wisdom. See, the trick is this. What you're taught in childhood nestles in deeply, deeply. It's almost like set in stone. Your intelligence sorts information but rarely goes deeper than that basic sense of reality. That you were given in childhood. If those basic beliefs are incorrect, but they're in alignment with socially agreed upon consensus, Your intellectual attempt to sort information is a lot like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. You're dealing with the wrong level of the problem. Your heart, on the other hand, represents the beliefs that connect us to love, ultimately to spirit. And spirit says, all are one, we are all connected. The intellect says this or that. Spirit says this and that. I suspect that the war between head and heart can tear people into pieces. I know I was torn to pieces as a child. I was torn. Obviously, I'm not a Zulu. I was torn between races, cultures, tribes, genders. Raised by my mother, my sister. My mother never remarried. She had some attitudes that she tried to protect me from them, but they were there. And it felt like I was disconnected from my own sense of power in life. And the world was going to eat me alive, just eat me alive. And I had nowhere to run and no place to hide, no tribe to protect me. And that is why I went into the martial arts. I mean, really, in the natural world, I would have been a. I would have been a poet or a healer or a shaman, and there would have been a tribe of warriors to protect me. I did not have that. So I had to, in essence, become my own group of warriors in order for my poet and my healer selves to be safe. That pain was horrible because it was accompanied by all sorts of fear. Feeling of what I should be and fear of if I cannot, will I survive? And what will people think of me? And will I ever be able to attract the kind of women that I'm attracted to or be respected by the kind of men I respect? I was an outsider in every conceivable way, and I found that I needed to go deeper than the answers that society gave me. If you say you believe in human equality but cannot forgive yourself for your own sins and failings, then you don't understand human nature enough to admit the terrible things that happen when people feel they have survival needs. Under such pressures as hunger, lack of air, deep loneliness, we fall back on the most basic survival circuitry leading to some very ugly behavior. Drowning swimmers take down the lifeguard. Honest people steal bread. Good people embrace lies. Loving people make political decisions that represent hatred and fear to others, if not in some impossible, determined, objective sense, and certainly in the subjective. For me, as a child, I could not accept my own fear and my shame of it, my fear of what it might mean. I mean that I was small and weak, that I couldn't, shouldn't, mustn't. That I was a coward was vastly more damaging than the emotion itself. Vastly. The emotion itself is just a feeling. The guilt, blame, and shame tore my heart out for decades. And I see this, this fear of the fear very clearly. With racism and sexism, for instance. Those are probably things that I've looked at most deeply, but it also manifests in religious bigotry. Politics is damn near built on this. All major religions claim to embrace a do unto others attitude, but when they're in conflict, they're great at accusing each other of being almost demonic while excusing similar behavior when committed by their own adherents. Is it possible to look at the guilt, to look at the pain in the world through this lens, through this lens, without guilt, blame, or shame, but also without excusing the monstrosity or allowing monsters to breed and kill our children? I believe it is. I cannot know because I'd have to be outside the system to really evaluate statements made from within it. But it is interesting that the chakra symbol for spirit is outside the body up here. If so, and I see this as representing thousands of years of wisdom, elevated thinking on the subject of what it is to be a human being, then the question is, what happens if I remain aligned with this idea, the spiritual ideal that is not controlled by our animal survival drives or even our intellect, while simultaneously serving the needs of the more fundamental survival drives? In other words, if you try to align yourself purely with spirit, without being connected with your survival drives, you're going to die. You're going to destroy your own family. Doesn't work. Remember, you can awaken the Kundalini, which means align the full power of your humanity from the bottom up or from the heart out, but never from the top down. This means that trying to focus on spirit or intellect before you've actually grounded yourself is likely to destroy you and lead to distortion and confusion. But if you begin with survival and then slowly realign your sexuality, power, emotions, communication with each other, moving toward intellect and spirit, the results can be exquisite. Or you can simply start with love and simultaneously seek the bottom, the root and the top, the flowering. That works, too. Works pretty well. In fact, my very favorite form of meditation is simply listening to my heartbeat, starting from that core. This was my journey as a child. It was a prayer. It was asking God, how can I be in the world, but not trapped by its illusions, trapped by my own perception of weakness. I asked that question a thousand, thousand times in front of a hundred different teachers on my Knees in prayer and cross legged in meditation and fighting for my honor in a hundred different martial arts schools until the illusions fell away and I saw myself and I forgave myself and I forgave the world. We're all just human beings. Children seeking love. Our fear masquerading as anger. Our. Our violence stemming from that same witches brew of survival drives justified by our philosophies. We do what we think we must to survive. What I'm saying is that we don't have to incrementally build on what has gone before. We actually have a new opportunity to leave behind the guilt and shame and fear simply by forgiving ourselves, forgiving our ancestors, but not trying to say the past didn't happen or that it doesn't influence the present. That is how we build the future. If this is true invalid. Then what does it say about the illusions we fall into and how we might view some basic conflicts so that we can move beyond them? With the caveat. Anything I say is caught in the system because it's words. And all words arise from the sea of poisoned milk called halahara in Sanskrit, I believe. I just want to offer some thoughts. 1. In terms of gender, men and women are both caught in the priorities of what might be called the selfish gene. The drive to produce the maximum number of grandchildren. Both men and women are caught in a straight jacket that is not determinative but strongly influential. It's an emergent behavior that touches everything we do if we're not careful. Unless you believe that women are stupid and cowardly, or that men are monsters who enjoy dying young and violently. There is something going on here other than the common narrative of submission and domination. There is nothing in gender interaction that cannot be explained by the fact that what is good for a species isn't necessarily good for individuals. And of course that some individuals are just bad people, just as some are unusually good. Death is great for a species. It allows. Evolution kind of sucks for individuals though. Much of what we see could be explained by an equation from the perspective of cranking out those grandchildren. Women's dreams and men's lives are disposable. Each side has illusions about what the other side is like. Men get conned into believing that it's just great to march into cannon fire. And women that they shouldn't try to compete with de guise. Humans are such silly creatures. But considering that our population has increased along with our social organization until the natural world that used to dominate us is now in danger from us, apparently it kind of worked. But we're in an era in which peak population, firearms, the industrial revolution, and effective birth control have offered a gender freedom unknown to our ancestors, a leveling of the playing field, a chance to ask very different questions. The way ahead is forgiving ourselves and each other. If men are really advantaged by the current situation, they will fight to the death to maintain their power. But if the con game has stolen from both sides, that also conferred advantage to both sides. All you have to do to get all the goodies is wake up from the matrix. Then we can walk together into a better future. Anyone who thinks that women are inherently more peaceful and wonderful haven't looked at the statistics of what happens in female female relationships or if the woman is larger than the guy, just as much violence and domination. If you can understand that women have made less geographical discovery, art and science largely as a matter of the roles we've played up until this point, then you can cut men some slack too. Otherwise, you're a bigot. Two Terms of Race the Black white situation in America. Now, this is, of course, my piece of this pie. The thing that I've thought about more than anything else for various and sundry reasons, go into another time, requiring a ton of serious thought over many decades to pierce that illusion. If, in fact I actually have, how would I know? Because I'm inside the puzzle. That thought really does disturb me. I can't even know whether or not I know. However, I have to move forward with faith or I'm frozen. You know, in terms of looking at race, the simple answer is pretty obvious and can be heard whenever radicalized members of either society, either group, gather. And it's this. Either blacks are intellectually inferior or whites are morally inferior. There it is. That's a simple equation. You can hear it in chat rooms, Facebook threads, and barbershops across the country. Sometimes it's thinly veiled behind polite speech or political rhetoric, but there it is. And the conflict with the heart and spirit here is that the spirit wants to believe in equality of the soul while being unable to reconcile history with the intellect. The answer is that you have to see how you personally have done terrible things when you thought you needed to. If you can see that, own that, and forgive yourself for that, you'll be able to happen. You'll be able to understand what happened on a social level in this country. From my perspective, all that happened is that America had a need for cheap labor and tried different things before settling on Africans. That the harvesting of Africans was possible not because of genetics, but because of A differential level of development over a few thousand years of history. A mere blink in the 250,000 years of human history, and even less than that in the progress of primate evolution. It's nothing that that labor was more valuable in some areas of the country than others. And it was considered critical in the south that social institutions and philosophies evolved to support this economic need and that those mythologies survived the war that ended it. That because in America there was no equivalent to the Truth and Reconciliation panels in South Africa following the fall of apartheid or the massive anti Nazi education following World War II, what I call the CSA, the current Southern apologia was allowed and encouraged to fester, reinforced by literature and film promoting an entire raft of justifications, distractions, half truths, irrelevancies and outright lies to promote the idea that nothing unusually bad had happened. Is that true in human history? Yeah, sure, it probably is. Even in American history. Compared to what happened to the Native Americans, it's probably true. But in comparison to what happened to the armies of immigrants who fought and suffered to get here, believing America's streets were lined with gold, thinking that those two things are equivalent is a bizarre and venomous fabrication, because there is no way to follow that conclusion without concluding someone is inferior. Even those immigrants were stupid or the children of slaves are inferior for not keeping up with them. Now, let me ask you a question. Why was this collection of mythologies important? One, to protect from guilt and shame and cries for reparations and revenge. Two, to protect from fears of moral inferiority. Remember, if you believe in equality, there's only the problem. Developing the intellectual chunks to fill in the gap between worldly experience and spiritual insight. There. It's not easy, but there is massive work to do to understand human history in a way that doesn't require that you fall back on tropes of superiority or inferiority. But it is an exhilarating, joyous process. I loved it. I just loved it. Felt like I was digging for gold. But what happens if, deep underneath all of your polite rhetoric, you really believe in inferiority? You know, you're trying to be a good American, but underneath it all. Nah, not really. I'll say it, but I don't believe it. Then your fallback position, if you lose your belief in superiority, is a swing of the pendulum, not to equality, but to feeling like the scum of the earth. Like a manic becoming depressive. If I can't be superior, I must be inferior. That is the opposite position, the contrary position, the more evolved position to pat myself on the back here. Sorry about that. Is equality real equality? But that was never on the table at all. If underneath it, you believe in superiority of either group, why is the csa, the current Southern apologia, so damaging? Denying the severity of what occurred leads naturally to a why can't you just get over it? Which leads to a they can't get over it because they just aren't as strong and smart. Sorry. You know, I don't care what you say about this. I've heard that logic countless times over the decades of my life. From white bigot.