6 grand illusions that keep us enslaved

Wisdom Quarterly; Sigmund Fraud (WakingTimes.com, Feb. 2, 2015)

The Buddha talked about four illusions, distortions, "perversions," seeing things as they are NOT. Enlightenment is waking up from delusions. We are not even awake to daily illusions.

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“In prison, illusions can offer comfort.”

– former South African political prisoner Nelson Mandela

C'mon, ya don't really wanna read this.

For a magician to fool an audience the deceit must go unseen, and to this end one crafts an illusion to avert attention from reality. While the audience is entranced, the deceptive act is committed, and for the fool, reality then becomes inexplicably built upon on a lie. That is, until the fooled person wakes up and recognizes the truth of the fact that one has been duped.

Comedian Russell Brand begins to see.

Maintaining willful suspension of disbelief in the illusion, however, is often more comforting than acknowledging the magician’s secrets.

We live in a world of illusion. So many of the concerns that occupy the mind and the tasks that fill the calendar arise from planted (conditioned) impulses to become someone or something that we are not.
 
This is no accident. As we are indoctrinated into an authoritarian corporate consumer culture, which now dominates the human race, we are trained that certain aspects of our society are unquestionable truths and that particular ways of being and behaving are preferred.

Psychopaths disempower many people in this way. They blind us with never ending barrages of suggestions and absolutes, which are aimed at shattering self-confidence and confidence in the future.

Bansky, the revered and elusive revolutionary street artist, once commented:
 

Wait, this is MY life? I thought I was in rehearsal!

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you, and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers, and they are laughing at you.” – Banksy

Advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. When we look further we see that the overall organization of life is centered around the pursuit of illusions and automatic obedience to institutions and ideas that are not at all what they seem. We are in a very real sense enslaved. Many call this somewhat intangible feeling of oppression "the matrix," a system of total control that invades the mind, programming individuals to pattern themselves in accordance with a mainstream conformist version of reality (the consensus reality), no matter how wicked it gets.

The grandest of the illusions that keep us enslaved to the matrix, the ones that have so many of us still entranced, are outlined below for your consideration.

1. The Illusion of Law, Order, and Authority

I can prove this is not an illusion. Obey!

For so many of us, following the law is considered a moral obligation, and many of us gladly do so even though corruption, scandal, and wickedness repeatedly demonstrate that the law is plenty flexible for those who have the money to bend it.

Police brutality and police criminality are rampant in the US, the courts favor the wealthy, and we can no longer even lead lives privately due to the intrusion of the NSA, FBI, CIA, NSC, DHS, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the "surveillance state" in general.

And all the while the illegal and immoral Orwellian permanent war rages on in the background of life, murdering, and destroying whole nations and cultures.

Occupy Hong Kong says no to China.

The social order is not what it seems, for it is entirely predicated on conformity, obedience, and acquiescence which are enforced by fear of violence. History teaches us again and again that the law is as often as not used as an instrument of oppression, social control, and plunder, and any so-called authority in this regard is false, hypocritical, and unjust.

Ukraine says no to its police, arrests them.

When the law itself does not follow the law, there is no law, there is no order, and there is no justice. The pomp and trappings of authority are merely a concealment of the truth that the current world order is predicated on control, not consent.
 
2. The Illusion of Prosperity and Happiness

Why aren't you more beautiful, Ugly?

Adorning oneself in expensive clothes and trinkets, and amassing collections of material possessions that would be the envy of any 19th century monarch has become a substitute for genuine prosperity. Maintaining the illusion of prosperity, though, is critical to our economy as it is, because its foundation is built on consumption, fraud, credit, and debt. The banking system itself has been engineered from the top down to create unlimited wealth for some while taxing the eternity out of the rest of us.

True prosperity is a vibrant environment and an abundance of health, happiness, love, and relationships. As more people come to perceive material goods as the form of self-identification in this culture, we slip farther and farther away from the experience of true prosperity.

3. The Illusion of Choice and Freedom

We Donkeys and Elephants are opposites.

Read between the lines and look at the fine print, we are not free, not by any intelligent standard. Freedom is about having choice, yet in today’s world, choice has come to mean a selection between available options, always from within the confines of a corrupt legal and taxation system and within the boundaries of culturally accepted and enforced norms.

Just look no further than the phony institution of modern democracy to find a shining example of false choices appearing real. Two entrenched, corrupt, archaic political parties are paraded as the pride and hope of the nation, yet third party and independent voices are intentionally blocked, ridiculed and plowed under.

The illusion of choice and freedom is a powerful oppressor because it fools us into accepting chains and short leashes as though they were the hallmarks of liberty. More

• Why interacting with a woman can leave men [distracted and] "cognitively impaired (Scientific American)

Those bot-generated adverts can be so seductive! How did they know we like sensuality?