Category: shamanism

The Red Pill and Those Who Have Seen Beyond

The phrase “to get redpilled” means to get woken up, usually painfully, to the true nature of things, especially in the context of having previously believed something that wasn’t true. It comes from the famous scene in the 1999 film The Matrix.

In the scene, Morpheus offers Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) two pills: a blue one and a red one. If he takes the blue one, he will wake up again in his ordinary life having forgotten that he ever realised there was anything unusual about it. If he takes the red one, he wakes up into the real world, which is, of course, the foundational reality underneath the matrix.

And there, as Morpheus puts it: “We see how deep this rabbit hole goes.”

It is thus slightly different to merely learning something through suffering, which is a superset to the specific case of learning that something previously thought to be true was in fact false.

This means that the red pill, and the phrase “to become redpilled” is the modern expression of an ancient sentiment. It is how 21st century people talk about having taken some steps along the shamanic path – the path for those who have seen beyond.

Usually a person gets redpilled by being treated much worse than they expected to be by an authority figure, and thereby becoming aware that the promises of solidarity from those authority figures – promises which are the very foundation of that authority – are worthless.

Many young people are redpilled by the Police. There are two major ways this happens.

The first is getting arrested for something like using medicinal cannabis. Getting put in a cage for using a medicine that improves your mental health immediately liberates a person from the illusion that the Police are there to protect and serve the citizenry.

The second way is by taking a complaint to the Police and being told to fuck off. This has forever been the case if one was a woman reporting the domestic violence of one’s husband, or a racial minority reporting being abused by one’s employer.

People are also redpilled by doctors. Telling a doctor about how cannabis is an effective medicine for your condition, only to be told to fuck off because the doctor makes more money out of pharmaceuticals than they ever could out of cannabis, will redpill anyone.

And, of course, most people have been redpilled by politicians, because one only needs to live through two electoral cycles to have seen all this shit before.

The Greatest and Silent Generations were redpilled by the Great Depression and by World War II. The Baby Boomers were redpilled by Vietnam and by the Drug War. Generation X were redpilled by the War of Terror and also by the Drug War.

Fundamentally, to get redpilled is to see beyond social conditioning. It is when one realises that the cozy patchwork of moral values in which one had wrapped oneself in was nothing more than a half-arsed convenience arrived at by one’s lack of intellectual capacity.

It is when you see beyond the comfortable little paradigm that your local authority figure knows what’s best for their people under their control.

It is when you realise that your working with the system simply and necessarily perpetuates it, and usually to your detriment.

It is when you realise that you have the freedom to choose your attitude to reality and thereby the consequences that come with that.

If a person gets redpilled from their social conditioning, this is the same as seeing beyond. And so writing “for those who have seen beyond” is also writing for those who have been redpilled.

This also means that any of the traditional shamanic methods for seeing beyond – psychoactive drugs, sensory deprivation, vision quests, sleep deprivation, rhythmic music, sexual ecstasy, fasting, meditation – are all potentially ways to redpill oneself.

The False Dichotomy of Nihilism vs. Fanaticism

Why is the world so fucking crazy? Here’s the short answer: people prefer the certitude of moral fanaticism to the yawning, howling chasm of despair that is nihilism. This essay argues that this false dilemma will always arise in the hearts and minds of people who have failed to dial their frequency into the range of gold, for whatever reason.

As any existentialist can tell you, nihilism is an inevitable part of being human. If one is not dull in the head, one soon observes that the vast majority of politicians, rulers, religious men and media figures are liars and thieves, essentially just master pirates, and one turns from there quickly to despair.

This despair tends to neither last nor transmute directly to nihilism. It doesn’t last because the naivete into which one was brainwashed soon reasserts itself. Because it reasserts itself, the despair does not transmute into nihilism.

A dull person will cling to this naivete once it is reasserted, and will not let it go again for fear of the despair that filled that gap last time. An intelligent person will break it down again, choosing by an act of will or intuition to understand that their suspicions about the true order of things were correct, and that one can never trust a person claiming to be one’s superior.

If the child-like naivete cannot reassert itself, usually because a person has developed a deep cynicism towards it, then despair will eventually turn to nihilism. This only occurs once a state of learned helplessness has been achieved. From here, things will go one of two ways depending on the philosophical sophistication of the person involved.

One way is to reach a kind of philosophical maturity. This way is really, really hard and is outside the scope of this essay. Essentially it is the same task as creating the Philosopher’s Stone, or reaching nirvana, or spiritual absolution, or becoming the Overman.

The second way is to become a fanatic about something. In practice, it doesn’t actually matter what one becomes a fanatic about, although each individual fanatic will doubtlessly have a number of illogical, contradictory or spurious reasons to support their supposedly heartfelt belief. All that matters is that it feels better than nihilism.

It can be observed in many people that they have become fanatics about something in order to distract their minds from the ennui that arises from considering existence authentically. Honest philosophical thought seems to lead directly to panic as nothing appears to matter and we appear to die.

One absolves oneself of the moral imperative to be authentic once one becomes a fanatic. The life of a fanatic is defined. It is defined primarily by those one stands in opposition to.

If a National Socialist, one opposes Commies; if a Communist, one opposes Nazis. If a supporter of one’s military, one opposes all other militaries. If a supporter of one’s soccer team, one opposes all other soccer teams. If a feminist, one opposes the patriarchy, if a men’s rights activist one opposes feminists, if a Muslim one opposes the infidel, if a Catholic one opposes the heathen, and so it goes.

This process is as true of groups as it is of individuals. Thus we can see that, ironically, the mass rejection of the mainstream moral narrative that followed World War I laid the furrow for the mass fanaticism that led to World War II.

Becoming a fanatic in this manner leads to a very soothing and very temporary kind of peace. One soon becomes surrounded by like-minded fanatics and, from there, it is trivial to convince oneself that the mission all of you are on is the true and righteous one and that by rebuilding the world in your image you will genuinely create a utopia for all.

Doing so, however, comes at a bitter cost. In refusing to act authentically by becoming a fanatic, one inevitably finds oneself forced to either tell lies or to commit violence, for all falsehood finds expression in the human world in one of those two ways.

Observing the reality around you before taking action usually gives you necessary clues about who you are and what your role in this place is. This is the basis of Pyrrhonic wisdom, which is to ask what the nature of things actually is before you react to it.

This column contends that the way to peace is to look beyond; to look beyond the reasons people say they do things and the moral superiority they claim motivates their actions and see the true frequency of their spirits. And then apply that same caustic cynicism to oneself, usually in meditation.

Only by doing this can a person correctly observe the terrain before them and move accordingly.

Why Lucifer is a Symbol of Enlightenment

Even in his aspect of the fallen angel, Lucifer is a symbol of enlightenment. In his place as King of the World, Lucifer shows the way towards maximal excellence in one’s life.

The Abrahamist interpretation of the myth of the fallen angel is that they were cast out of Heaven owing to a deliberate moral failure. The usual story is that God had put everything in its correct and perfect order, and Lucifer, out of pride, refuses to accept the primacy of this and therefore earns his sentence of being cast from Heaven – a sinner.

Like most things that Abrahamists believe, this is close to the opposite of the truth. To understand the real truth, one must understand that the Abrahamisms are chiefly male supremacist religions, as they were dreamed up by old men resentful of the young who were still sexually potent, as they once were.

Thus, Heaven can be taken as representing not a state of perfect balance, as one might consider perfection to be, but instead a state of perfect masculinity. The male God is in charge in Heaven and everyone knows it, and everyone knows their place in the hierarchy of subordination.

To another kind of mind, to the sort of person who might be said to be approaching a Luciferian state of consciousness, this state of affairs represents an excess of order so stultifying, so suffocating, that it is anti-life.

When everything is in a state of perfect order, nothing can ever change or go forwards, and this is tantamount to death for anyone who is not afraid of the feminine principle in her manifestation as chaos.

Therefore, as fallen angel, Lucifer most fairly represents someone who rejected the sterile purity and bubble-wrapped certainty of Heaven for the brutal, wild-eyed insanity of the World.

In doing so, he chose to embrace the material world rather than to be afraid of it, and thus made himself appear evil to the cowardly Abrahamists who mutilate their own sons lest they enjoy themselves unduly.

This is what makes Lucifer a symbol of evil to followers of the Abrahamic cults. Because these cults fear the physical world – an attitude reflected in their contempt for the feminine – they naturally envy and despise those who do not.

The main reason why the Abrahamist fears the material world is, ironically, his lack of spiritual knowledge. Believing that the material world is the primary reality, he naturally develops a terrified attitude towards death, observing it to be the death of the body he mistakenly identifies with, and so believing it to be the end of him.

Lucifer represents a rejection of, and a reaction to, this pants-pissing. He represents the masculine light of consciousness entering the dark, cold physical world, not as a fall or a punishment, or as the nefarious trap of some demiurge, but rather as an opportunity to make love.

Knowing himself to be the light of consciousness, and therefore knowing himself to be eternal and incapable of being sullied, Lucifer was not afraid of the material. In being not afraid, and in being truly spiritual, he represents a degree of masculinity that is the natural complement to the physical or material world.

This can even be read into the very name of Lucifer himself – a cognate of lucid and of lux, both of which carry connotations suggesting the light of consciousness.

This gets to the heart of why the reputation of Lucifer has been so relentlessly lied about. In representing the light of consciousness he embraced the physical world without fear, and so cannot be manipulated into disgracing himself or harming others through threats to his physical body.

If this degree of wisdom was more widespread there would be a higher standard of human existence in this place.