THE BAFFLING FOGS OF ILLUSION AND EXCLUSIONS.

The Matrix has you, [insert your name here].

When I first began my quest to know truth, I knew that my reality was composed of culturally distilled and personally fabricated by lies, distortions, and delusions, all masked under a network of careful forgetting. Deprogramming was a function I thought would be swift, relatively easy, like lifting a stone and revealing a mass of squirming worms and writhing insects partying around molds and corpses. One good tug should do it. That was 2007. Nearly twenty years later, I’m still engaged in the undoing of delusion, fighting the Fog of Illusions that plagues us — plagues me — every day, in every conceivable way.

There is reality, and there is the actual, and there is the totality. Two of those are objective; reality is subjective and manufactured. The totality is the sum truth of all, unmolested by man’s arrogance and ego, only masked by Mammon in his dark reality, blinding us to the truth of what we can know of the totality, which is the actual. Our perceptors are not total; they cannot take in the full breadth of universal stimuli in their entirety. So the totality can only be theorized, approximated by us, never fully contacted in its entirety. The actual, meanwhile, is the raw data feed from the totality that is narrowed by what perception allows. But is not the real that buttresses and defines our realities. Those are a function of perceptual honing and interpretation that contribute to social agreements so that we can be united in a semi-common frame of reference, all of which is culturally fabricated and engendered upon and within us. That reality is composed by at least as many deceptions as truths, and, furthermore, it is defined by what it excludes far more than what it includes. We can call this reality’s defining mechanisms The Baffling Fog of Illusions and Exclusions, and we can understand from there that we are lost not in a sea of true but slogging through a gross land of confusion and consternation we too often look away from, too often flinch, rather than confront and try to make sense of.

Our realities don’t serve us; they serve the powerful. And we know that generally, but not intricately because we don’t follow the money, we don’t follow the evidence trails, which are made to baffle and exhaust us before our investigations lead too close to the truth. But could you even fathom their twisted truths if you tasted them, whole or in part? You ask, then, if they do, too? The answer, bluntly, is that some do, and some don’t, but those that don’t understand enough that they don’t have to fathom everything to steer their portion of our reality to ever greater, spiraling reaches of power.