Red Pill or the Blue Pill?

• Red Pill or the Blue Pill: Seeing Through Mistaken Beliefs

• Half-day Retreat, August 2nd

• What I’m Watching: Jupiter and Venus

• A Poem, by Wu-Men

• What I’m Baking: Blueberry Cobbler

What if your life (and my life) contains a variety of mistaken, erroneous beliefs? Or as in the film The Matrix, perhaps this life is an elaborate hallucination.

I don’t mean this as a philosophical puzzle. I mean it as a practical question — one that may be at the root of why so many people are turning to meditation, mindfulness, Buddhism, and yes, even psychedelics. Something in us suspects that the world we ordinarily perceive isn’t the whole story.

The Matrix puts this question on screen with unusual directness. Neo — Keanu Reeves — discovers he has been living inside a dream, his body suspended in a pod while robots feed his mind a perfect simulation of ordinary life. Morpheus delivers the verdict without softening it: “You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch — a prison for your mind.”

Then comes the choice. Blue pill: stay in the comfortable dream. Red pill: see through it.

Neo takes the red pill.

Most of us will never be offered an actual pill. (well, maybe some actual pills…) But many of us know the moment — the one where the familiar life suddenly feels insufficient, where the carefully constructed story we’ve been living starts to show its seams. Something stirs. A restlessness that we can’t, or don’t want to quiet. A sense that the path you’re on leads somewhere thin and unsatisfying.

I had that moment as a student at Rutgers, when I was 21 years old, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I took a one-year leave of absence that became ten years as a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center — trading the safe scaffolding of academic life for something I couldn’t fully name, only feel, pulling at me. Less security. More aliveness. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I knew I had to look.

That pull is what I think much of the current interest in meditation, mindfulness, and psychedelics is really about. Perhaps for some, there is an element of a need for stress reduction. For others, there is a need for productivity optimization. But mostly something deeper and more urgent is at play: the intuition that we are, in some important sense, asleep to our real aliveness, and that waking up is possible.

Living with more aliveness, waking up, turns out to be a series of insights, decisions, and practices. The urge to see more clearly reasserts itself — not through robots and pods, but through examining habits, assumptions, distractions, and seeing through our culture that emphases survival, comfort, and success. The work is learning to keep seeing clearly, even when clarity is inconvenient.

That’s an important aspect of meditation and of “practice.” Not only relaxation. Not only focus. But the dismantling of the illusions, delusions, and mistaken beliefs you can’t taste or see or touch.

The Matrix ends with Neo learning to see the code behind the simulation. Practice, at its heart, is not so different. You learn to see the assumptions behind the experience — and discover that what lies beyond them is something far more vivid than the dream.

The red pill doesn’t take you out of the world. It wakes you up inside it.

Practices

Notice the seams. The Matrix shows its unreality in small glitches — a black cat that appears twice, a déjà vu. Your own constructed reality has seams too: moments of inexplicable dissatisfaction, reactions that seem larger than their cause, a recurring sense that something important is missing. This week, when you notice one of those moments, get curious about what it might be pointing toward.

One uncomfortable question. Identify something you’ve been avoiding asking yourself — about your work, a relationship, the direction of your life. Write the question down. You don’t have to answer it yet. Just the act of writing it clearly is a form of red pill. The question, once asked honestly, begins its own work.

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(I was a just north of Bodega Bay last weekend.)

Half-day Retreat, In-person (Mill Valley) and Online, Sunday August 2nd, 9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

In our world of busyness, of more/faster/better, this half-day retreat offers time to stop, reflect, and renew. Together we’ll follow a gentle schedule of sitting and walking meditation, a talk, and some discussion. Anyone looking to begin or deepen a meditation and mindfulness practice is invited to attend….If you continue this practice, eventually you will experience the true existence which comes from emptiness.

What I’m Watching: Jupiter and Venus

I’ve been enjoying the show of Jupiter and Venus lighting up the western sky after sunset.

Venus is about 111 million miles away

Jupiter is about 560 million miles away

A Poem, by Wu-Men (1183 - 1260)

Ten thousand flowers in Spring, the moon in Autumn,

a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.

If you mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

What I’m Cooking - I generally stay away from butter, sugar, and heavy cream, but, every once in a while… (And, blueberries are very healthy.)

Blueberry cobbler, from chez Panisse

Ingredients

Yield:4 to 6 servings

THE BERRIES

• 4 ½ cups fresh blueberries

• ⅓ cup sugar

• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

THE DOUGH

• 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

• ½ teaspoon kosher salt

• 1 ½ tablespoons sugar

• 2 ¼ teaspoons baking powder

• 6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch pieces

• ¾ cup heavy cream

Preparation

1. Step 1

Heat the oven to 375 degrees. To prepare the berries, place in a bowl and toss with the sugar and flour. Set aside.

2. Step 2

To make the dough, mix the flour, salt, sugar and baking powder in a bowl. Cut in the butter until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the cream and mix lightly, just until the dry ingredients are moistened.

3. Step 3

Put the blueberries in a 1 ½-quart gratin or baking dish. Make patties out of the dough, 2 to 2 ½ inches in diameter and ½-inch thick. Arrange them over the top of the berries. Bake until the topping is brown and the juices bubble thickly around it, about 35 to 40 minutes.

4. Step 4

Let cool slightly. Serve warm.

Warmest regards,

Marc