The Matrix Choice: Red Pill? Blue?
Many of you remember that scene when the hero, Neo, is given the choice of taking the red pill or the blue pill. One keeps you in the Matrix in which you and everyone else in it are sleeping. Nothing changes for you. Or you awake from the dream and nothing is the same.
This morning I thought of another choice that I’ve read repeatedly in my spiritual studies: love or fear. In essence all our actions, all of our feelings and all of our thoughts come from love or fear. Just with the red pill or blue pill we make the choice. To keep the analogy going, if you choose to stay with fear, the world and your life as you’ve dreamed it so far continues in the same patterns. Sometimes you may think that all is going well only to be rudely pulled into shocking reality. Something in your life or some tragedy happening in the world upsets you.
If you choose love instead, we are promised that things change. The only way to learn whether this promise holds true is to experiment with the choices. But before you can embark on that path, you probably should look back and evaluated what has happened for you, in the past, for example, in the last hour. As you take each thought, feeling or action apart, can you see whether the base of it was fear or love?
Let me take a personal example. I’m a person who wants a certain amount of order around me. Recently I was in a home that more ordered than mine including cupboards and refrigerators. The impressed me. So much so that in coming home, I compared theirs to my cupboards and refrigerator. Bad news.
In that comparison I certainly wasn’t being loving toward myself: I made a certain standard be more important than me. I became critical and down on myself. To make it worse I said something to my partner about how his collection of coffee grounds wasn’t helping my sense of order. There was a certain amount of blame in my comments; it certainly was based in love. If not love, then it was fear: fear of not measuring up, of being overwhelmed, of being out of control, of not being important. The list can go on.
My suggestion that you take a few moments to evaluate is not to make you feel bad but to have you face what motivates you. You are not alone in this situation. Spiritual teachers in talking about choosing between love and fear had something very important to teach. If we don’t look clearly about what we do we may not ever know what it is we’re doing. Then we blindly stumble through life basically motivated by fear.
None of the above matters, of course, if we’re happy and satisfied with our lives. That is, we have enough of what we want. Let me tell about a lovely dear young friend of mine who has enviable success as most people would define it: she’s successful in her career; many important wealthy people utilize her services and praise her work; she has plenty of savings and could have just about anything she wants; her health is excellent; add to that she’s with a sweet man. Yet she confessed to me recently about how little any of that contributed to an internal sense of peace and fulfillment. She is presently experiencing a lot of deep fear and anxiety. All of the external trappings she said did not help with this internal sense of distress.
It takes courage to see things as they are. It takes a lot of courage to see yourself as you really are. When we do, we may learn that we’ve been programmed completely to live out of fear. And while we have occasionally touches of love, fear is much in our world, outside and inside.
How to choose for love? First you realize how things are you for and decide you want to move from fear toward love. Second, you find teachers in person or in books who teach you how to be more loving. My teachers are many and have changed over the years. Currently I’m finding the Disappearance of the Universe, Your Immortal Reality, and their source, A Course in Miracles, extremely helpful.
I am practicing to see more clearly, and to choose love whenever I can. As strange as it may seen, one avenue for this is the business I’m currently involved in which can be found below. You see, it’s how it is on the inside that counts.
Anne K. Uemura, Ph.D.
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