Flying In & Out Of The Matrix

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

SOUL works from the top down to the bottom.

BRAIN works from the bottom up to the top.

MIND is a combination of both.

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John Taylor Gatto (The Underground History of American Education, 2001, 2006) wrote …

“According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you’re a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a ‘gifted and talented’ label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by ‘proper’ social order.”

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John Shirley (Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, 2004) wrote …

“Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous cites Gurdjieff in a Russian café, pointing at the crowd in the street and saying, ‘Look, all those people you see are simply machines, nothing more.’

“Hearing this, Ouspensky was at first shocked. But we’re not entirely machines, he protested. Art, poetry, philosophy — in this people are more than mechanical, surely.

“No, said Gurdjieff emphatically. All that is mechanicality too. And so are the ‘great deeds’ of history. ‘Man is a machine. All his deeds, action, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action.'”

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SOUL is outside the Matrix.

BRAIN is trapped inside the Matrix.

MIND is susceptible to being trapped inside the Matrix, and usually is, but it can fly in and out of it wearing sunglasses and a duster-length coat if it so chooses.

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Octavius Sturges (Chorea and Whooping-cough: Five Lectures, 1877) wrote …

“To these sources of derangement from within [disfiguring muscular habits] others must be added from without. The circumstances in which we exist are not those that suit us the best. Passions and emotions continually interrupt the orderly course of organic life. In the presence of many injurious atmospheric agencies, it is only by artificial aids that existence is maintained for a while with but a gradual deterioration and a tolerable amount of disorder. Not seldom external influences, which are never wholly on our side, become so actively hostile that over large tracts of the globe it becomes the rule to suffer and even, as in the many desolating epidemics of Europe, the rule to perish.

“With disorder thus intimately interwoven with the fabric of life there is yet a further disturbing element, in that mysterious kinship with disease which distinguishes hysteria. A large number of persons, typically healthy from the anatomist’s point of view, will so exercise their imaginations as to produce the semblance and experience some of the actual sensations of illness. That watchful personal control which, at the best, hardly suffices for its purpose, is with these replaced by a restless craving after the material for disorder and the opportunity for emotional display.

“We have to regard the human organism, therefore, not as it is formed by nature, but as it is deformed by use; not as it is in itself, but as it is made by the environment. The freedom and liberty of choice which seem, at the first, to belong to it get weakened by the force of custom and the bias of some particular indulgence. There is no perfection of being; only certain avenues of escape and modes of discharge are provided for the disorders we are destined to endure.

“It is true, indeed, that everyone has his own notion of ‘the sound mind in the sound body,’ picturing to himself, more or less clearly, both typical health and the several degrees of declension from it, until the exact point is reached where he would have ‘disease’ begin. But the demarcation is a perfectly arbitrary one, and corresponds with nothing that is in nature. ‘Health’ means to you or to me that particular measure and manner of response and general behaviour which each of us, from his own point of view, happens to regard as the best and fittest. ‘Disease’ is, for both of us, any departure from that condition. Anyone is at liberty to invoke names like these. They have been bequeathed to us, like many more, with no conditions attached which we need at all regard. You may recognise ‘disease’ in whatever quickens the heart or flushes the cheek, since every such event implies material change and is calculated to produce lasting mischief; or you may say, on the contrary, the variability of function under appropriate stimulus is so wide that we cannot identify disease till we meet with its material products. In the one case you hypothesise an individual who is only in health in a particular mood and a particular set of circumstances which you choose to assign him. In the other you make functional variation of itself a source of suffering and even a cause of death.”

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