Intro:
Something in Neo knows the world (as presented to his senses) is incomplete. This feeling cannot be explained; it is something felt in the heart. So, Morpheus presents Neo with the choice of knowing the truth, by taking a red pill, or continued ignorance, by taking a blue pill. Neo chooses the red pill and becomes privy to the truth.
Visions of Mountaintops and Boundaries:
Imagine my surprise, an atheist lawyer, steeped in science and the material world, and learned in the legal extrapolations of said material world, when I found myself at the top of a mountain, receiving a download of information which ran counter to everything I'd assumed about the nature of reality.
While seated in my living room (on LSD), I was granted a vision of myself at the peak of a mountain. I understood the peak to be the endpoint of the path of life that I was currently on. It was the peak that a life in service to materialism would get me to. But all around me were many more peaks, atop equally impressive mountains, poking through the fog of the cloudy canopy below. I understood each peak to represent a separate path from my own. I was gifted with the gnosis that many paths lead to enlightenment.
In that moment, my militant atheism, which I modeled after my heroes (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al) began to melt away. My arrogance toward religious and spiritual-types began to subside. I was gifted with an adumbration of all that I did not know, and I felt embarrassed at the level of confidence and arrogance under which I espoused my earlier materialist views.
At the same time, or maybe shortly thereafter, I experienced a separate active imagination (or vision) regarding the idea of novelty (of experience or action). I floated up into space, until I perceived a bubble-like boundary, which I knew to be symbolic of the boundary line of knowledge or skill within any profession, hobby, sport, area of study, discipline, or any human action worth undertaking.
I floated into space toward the boundary and stuck my hand through it and received another download of information which communicated to me that a virtuous goal in life is to obtain gnosis of this boundary line in any discipline, and to attempt to expand or push beyond this boundary line, such that your contribution expands the boundary for all mankind.
So not only was I gifted with the wisdom and permission to walk my own path, but I was granted permission and encouragement to become the best version of myself while walking my path. It was another version of the lesson taught to Arjuna by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. But it was a lesson tailored to me.
In retrospect, I'd like to point out that these visions did not sink-in for me right away. I sat with these experiences for some time, not really knowing what they meant. Sometimes you return with a clear message. Sometimes you return with seeds planted in your subconscious, which only find the soil of your mind to be hospitable after more tilling and preparation.
A New Path:
I often think about how rare it is to find a person who genuinely walks his own path. I so respect and admire people who do.
I had awakened. So for the first time, free from somnambulism, I took stock of my life, and I found it to be not-too-shabby, something I could work with. In hindsight, this was the beginning of the end of my life, and I would not be giving my life to a higher calling, a path guided by heart, not some inherited operating system with values that I'd never questioned.
I wouldn't know until much later that a myth would emerge, like a phoenix from the ashes of my former life.
I began to experience culture all around me as if it were emanating from deep within the subconscious of civilization, while simultaneously being created by civilization. I could see culture. I was privy to its many signals emanating from various sources around me, like wifi signals. I could see it in the expressions, personalities, and habits of individuals. I could see it pulsing through social media. It was the force behind the matrix which was animating everyone and everything under its spell.
I had really bought into the culture of the American Dream, and it feels like I never had a choice. I had so much respect for my parents and Greek-American culture, that I joined in to help them create the dream that they were collectively building.
I went to school and became a lawyer. It was the most respectable thing I could do to honor my mother and father, to give them a son they could be proud of, in the eyes of the culture that animated their thoughts and beliefs. For a while, it worked.
But because the sole purpose for my becoming a lawyer was financially motivated, I ended up playing the lawyer game all wrong. The people who love the lawyer game, love the television version of the job. Everyone else is just going through the motions. That's what I was doing.
Now that I was aware of what the culture had made me do, I wanted out.
But, now, what would I do?
I thought about that a lot.
What did I love?
Sports (being active), the outdoors, refining my daily rituals to honor and sharpen the temple of my body. My default mode, when I'm not chasing after and falling into the trappings of life, is curiosity. I'm fundamentally curious about this reality we exist within. What is the true nature of reality? Why am I here?
I wanted to explore and probe the nature of reality, from my favorite place in the world (Porto Atheras). This is the place I feel most connected to, where the desire to fall into the trappings of life fade away. When I'm in Porto Atheras, I inhabit the creative mindset with the highest fidelity connection. It is a place where dreams become simpler - I want to learn gardening, animal husbandry, winemaking, and bee-keeping, fishing, sailing. All dreams that are born from living in balance and harmony with the natural environment.
In America's midwest, the environment begs most loudly for its inhabitants to make more money, to get more stuff, to better cope with the lack of stimulation of the environment.
Tough Pill to Swallow:
My own red-pilling event was doubly intense, because not only did my materialist view of the world melt away, but so did my reverence for the extrapolative nature of law - afterward, it all just seemed so silly.
For this reason, red pills are often very hard pills for lawyers to swallow.
Lawyers are more invested in the structure of materialism than the average person, because their livelihoods are dependent upon the extrapolative constructs of law, which organize and "civilize" the material world. The law is just a container into which the material world unfolds.
Lawyers operate on imaginary deadlines, contracts with arbitrary terms and definitions, and established laws and concepts, all which aim to govern behavior. A lawyer who has been awakened to the mystical and occult simply cannot have the same level of respect (or fear) for the artificial constructs of law, so there is naturally a period where work performance suffers, and where a lawyer must learn to adapt to his newfound irreverence toward the field of law.
For me, there was a period of adjustment. Eventually, I got to a place where I accepted my newfound irreverence as a gift rather than an existential burden. I could now do my job, unemotionally. If someone was having a bad day and decided to unleash frustration unto me, I could absorb it for them, unbothered, whereas before they would have likely gotten a rise out of me and my ego would have made things worse. My temperament is better now, generally.
For the time being, I still need to practice law to make ends meet, until my hopefully graceful transition into my chosen path becomes a reality. I think that path has something to do with The Atherian, this myth that I am creating, by deciding in every moment to live from my heart, in spite of what my head begs me to do. Interesting to note how the head slowly begins to agree with the heart as the logical path cedes favor to the intuitive path.
So why did I take a red pill?
In truth, I didn't know that's what I was doing when I placed the tab of LSD onto my tongue.
I heard stories about the visual experiences of psychedelics, but I was woefully unprepared for the reality-melting experience.
I was not prepared for the information download, which entered my mind like a Trojan Horse and planted seeds in me which would blossom into new saplings of curiosity and wisdom in their own time - saplings that would harden into knowledge, nurtured by the energy of wisdom. I could not have anticipated the demands these new ideas would have on my time and attention. I could not have anticipated my own transformation. There is a dynamic quality to life that has made itself known to me. I live in conversation with god. I co-create with it, using techniques that are unique to me, through the compass of my heart.
The pre & post-awakening versions of me are fundamentally different, as if the forces animating me changed completely.
Years later, I find myself shaking off old habits of behavior which I created in my somnambulistic era, but now, instead of serving my old masters with blind obedience, I often dwell on a plane above myself, capable, at once, of self-analysis and self-indulgence. I have become, at once, the doer, the observer, and the observed. That is, I can fall into auto-pilot, where the mind uses the inertia of ego ego to create messages through spontaneous art.
I now trust that, over-time, a gestalt of patterns will emerge, which will communicate a higher and higher fidelity message, through dreams and art. The base language of reality is myth. History is wrought with recycled myths. God, at the apex of his curiosity, is novelty seeking. Therefore, the creation of a new mythology is god's aim for me. This is what the Atherian aims to be, and it stands upon the epic shoulders of two towering myths: Apollo & Dionysius, at the crossroad of reason and passion.
Apollo is a symbol of light, warmth, and renewal. Bringer of health, harmony, and truth. He embodies the physical and spiritual pursuit of excellence. The radiant sun god Apollo inspires creation, balance, and growth. Guided by the maxim "Know Thyself", he leads those on the path of ambition, virtue, and self-discovery.
Dionysius is ectasy, chaos, and release. Giver of wine, madness, and raw emotion. He embodies surrender to impulse, the body, and the night. The wild vine-god Dionysus summons theater, music, and unfiltered truth - stripping away masks till you're howling at the moon. Guiding by abandon, he drags you past reason into communion, frenzy, and whatever's left when ambition burns out.
The Valley of Novelty:
Once your reality is deconstructed, and you encounter the wisps of gnosis which animate your new world-view, you become more present, more keenly aware of who else is awakened and animated by this "spirit of the depths" (as Jung would say). You feel alone, but also, you remember that you are everything. You begin your philosophical and spiritual journeys, in earnest.
I find it addictively challenging to attempt to explain in words that which I have experienced, which is ineffable. This is the grace inherent in the red pill experience. Whereas before, collecting money, conquests, respect, and admiration were the aims of my materialistic existence, now, I value above all things the honest engagement of my mind in matters concerning the lived experiences of those who have already embarked upon this path that I'm on. More than that, I am enjoying finding balance in the challenge of swimming against the current of "dominator culture" (as Terence McKenna puts it).
Though a deep part of me knows and understands that the most valuable thing I can do is walk my own path, creating novelty in the process - I find myself with an insatiable appetite for consuming the many high quality documented works and lived experiences of those who came before me. That others before me, animated by the same spirit, attempted to explain the ineffable adumbrations of their own experiences is a gift. A gift that has been squared by the interconnectivity of the internet, and amplified by the sense-making function of Ai. I find the accounts and experiences of truth seeking artists as fascinating, a ballet of the mind - I revel in the beautiful prose of their experiences.
If the same god is behind the great works of great men - then it is reasonable to assume that god uses each magnum opus as a brushstroke, in pursuit of some larger creation. Matter is made of language.
Most prescient are the works of people like McKenna, Watts, and Dass - the bulk of whose work pre-dated the internet, and so whose efforts and motivation seem the most pure and authentic. The internet has now revived their work, and I find it an excellent use of my time to consume as much of it as possible as I prepare to subject myself, some day soon, to the relative discomfort of novelty. I do this now because it appears to be the right thing to do in the present moment.
As I consume the experiences of others who have walked in the Valley of Novelty, I'm learning to trust the animating force in me. Learning to trust and remain present in the moment. Learning that novelty is all around, if I make the choices to see and experience it. But I still have a wandering and imperfect mind. I do not linger in the past, but I find myself dreaming of a future home which has yet to be built. I suppose I am wise enough to know I can't change what's been, while a part of me knows (or thinks it knows) the importance of dreaming, because now, I think, maybe, the world is magic.
Dreaming, meditating, or praying suddenly don't seem pointless, because I believe that reality is created in the mind.