The Dream That Humanity Is Unable To Wake Up From

Power, Religion and The Mind Prison

Buddhists often talk about something that sounds counter-intuitive but is actually most profound: “The mind is a prison”. According to this concept, all of us can become consumed by our own thoughts to the point where we become hijacked, ceasing to pay attention to real events and stimuli from our physical environment. We begin to alternate between the real world, and this made-up reality inside our thoughts which our mind prison has constructed. As we spend more of our time in the latter, the real world begins to fade away: it becomes a mere version of the mind prison.

In time, it becomes difficult to register correctly which one of the two worlds we inhabit at any given point in time: the mind prison of our thoughts, or the real world, where real people live and die and real events occur. By living in this parallel universe, we fall into a precarious state of unconsciousness whereby, although we may be able to perform all our daily tasks, we have lost cognition of everything real. We begin to miss out on critical events which lie outside of our automatic routine, even as these unfold in broad daylight. Events which, had we been awake, we could have had an influence on.

Although this mental state sounds terrifying, it is more common than it seems. It is the source of much of the tunnel vision, denial, ignorance, dogmatism and prejudice that have plagued humans through the ages. The mind prison exists because it serves a purpose: denial is a type of mental shortcut as well as a "safe" room to retreat to as we take shelter from uncomfortable truths.

Humans are always sceptical towards unfamiliar scripts they encounter for the first time. They don’t simply challenge the validity of these scripts. They question their very existence. It is incredibly soothing to seek familiar images and systematically dismiss anything unusual as an “outlier”, a temporary glitch in the universe. The knee-jerk reaction of humans has always been to disregard unusual events rather than bring them to their awareness, process them, analyze and interrogate them. These analytical brain functions require a good grounding in the present, and a freedom from bias which can only take place outside the walls of the mind prison.

By spending excess time trapped in the safety of our mind prisons, we quickly become bystanders to reality. Torn between multiple narratives fed to us by the necrosystem, we become unable to distinguish the images of the mind prison from the real world. Telling the mind prison’s video game virtual reality apart from the real world takes so much effort, we eventually give up: the mirror world has defeated us. As AI replaces reality, the time is only around the corner when humans will simply give up trying to distinguish real from unreal, digital from artificial, and truth from lie. The world we are about to inhabit is a dystopia of re-constructed facts where our level of interaction with this world will be much like being trapped inside a dream: all we can do is observe what is being done to us without any power to react, or resist.

The mind prison is nothing but an endless library of video games and scenarios that never happened. Every time we are preoccupied with our professional image, our identity, the past or future, the result is the same: we are entering a world that only exists in our head. The capitalist necrosystem oversaturates us with consumatronic stereotypes so that we eventually shut down. We become passive spectators to our own autobiographical movie, played by us but casted and written by someone else. Modern humans live a dystopian existence no different from an out-of-body experience, but where the popcorn is real as can be.

The mind prison is a creative space, but also a trap. Humans have been both blessed and cursed with the power of imagination: we use it in equal measure to solve problems and simultaneously deny their existence. Although imagination is a useful skill, excessive rumination prevents one from assigning reality the importance it deserves. Our leaders have known for thousands of years that the more they distract us, the easier it will be to corrupt our thought process. Given that the mind prison struggles to access reality, it is incredibly susceptible to influence. The mind prison is indeed a prison, because it locks us out of the present. As long as we live in the past or the future, we are unable to take action right now. The AI dystopia can quickly become a one-way hologram, a dream one enters and never wakes up from: you try to run, only to discover that there is no ground beneath you to run on. People are surprised at how ineffective scientific facts have been in addressing climate crisis denial. They forget that the laws of physics cease to apply in a world made up of lies. Even reality itself is helpless against a well-groomed illusion.

The mind prison is increasingly the dominant place humans inhabit. The consequences of spending so much time in the virtual space of this never-ending dream state are disastrous: the more we neglect the real world, the more it deteriorates. We are setting the stage for the dream becoming a nightmare, and it won’t be virtual this time.

The unfortunate paradox of the human brain is that it can consciously choose which version of reality it believes in. Advanced civilisations tend to rest so much of their existence on autopiloted, dogmatic narratives that they leave no room for themselves to maneuver. They eventually become sleepwalkers into their own collapse. As long as the house furniture stays in the same place, the sleepwalker is safe from bumping into objects. Change the furniture around, and an entire civilisation is in for an unpleasant surprise.

As we desperately sought to create fake, safe spaces within our brains, we invented the most fantastical narratives. Responsibility for both our blessings and sins was conveniently offloaded to fictional characters of the distant past: heroes and villains, gods, semi-gods or actual historical humans idealized or chastised through the ages. The lies begun early, initially concocted to attribute weather patterns and natural calamities to an anthropomorphized force such as a god. With time these narratives matured into mythologies with a full cast of characters, eventually becoming full-blown religions. The more convenient the narrative, the more resonant it became among gullible masses craving for belonging, identity, and a safe Mind Prison.

It was only a matter of time before leaders realised the power that these fairy tales had. Over the millennia would-be leaders fabricated entire new religions to justify their motives, manipulate the public and offer convenient explanations for humanity’s greatest fears. Condemning any connection to the Earth as “pagan”, religions soon evolved into powerful tools of social control and centralization of authority by the nascent necrocapitalist psychonomy. To hedge themselves against critique, religion and authority conspired to overlay into religion complex narratives of inherited guilt, the evidence for which was conveniently lost in time: everything good about the world was due to a hero who died to redeem all future generations (Jesus), while everything bad was due to someone who made a tragic error, cursing all future humans (Icarus). In other words, we were told to be subserviently grateful for existing and at the same time feel guilty for all that we have. Our job as the clergy was to work hard to pay our inherited moral debt so that we eventually become guilt-free.

Another very popular narrative that repeats across cultures is that of a “hero” accidentally setting the foundations for an entire new country. This was a human speciesistic narrative constructed to teach us that no place can ever be sovereign or “civilised” until a human foot has stepped on it to forcefully claim it. But it was also a political tool: different tribes created their own myths around the foundation of their country. Today the geographic area of modern Israel is claimed by at least three different religions. Irrespective of who was there first, all three religious narratives are made-up storylines to begin with, yet presented as actual evidence by their respective clergies.

Both clergies and their leaders benefited immensely from religion: the former found a safe place to compartmentalize all their fears, while the latter achieved wealth by weaponizing these fears through faith-based storytelling. Those who dared to put their brain into use and question religious fairy tales were labelled as heretics and punished by death so that they pose no threat to power. Over thousands of years humanity genetically selected itself for stupidity and obedience by exterminating its critics. It is remarkable that despite this un-natural selection, people who question the system still exist.

Whatever the specific motives, these narratives, mythologies and religions had the same origin: they were born out of the Mind Prison’s imagination as it sought shelter in safe mental havens. The fact that these narratives were practically identical across thousands of human cultures despite evolving independently, demonstrates how crucial they were in forging obedient societies as populations grew. The plastic action figures our religious oligarchies invented became essential elements of the bricks and mortar of every single human society. They became humanity’s voodoo dolls, witches and Jesuses: shouldering both the blame and the glory, even though they had none of the responsibility. How could they be responsible? They never even existed.

Religion owes its roots to autocracy because only fascists are treated as Gods, welcomed as saviours, and self-appointed as punishers. Narratives of guilt and debt are rife throughout society today, both inside and outside of religion. The endless search for villains and external enemies may be the most ancient art of gaslighting, but it persists into today wholly unadulterated: whenever a leader tries to portray a helpless sheep as a big bad wolf, then you are looking at the wolf themselves masquerading as the leader. The main mythologies human civilisation relies upon today were put together millennia ago by the rich and powerful. There is no Jesus, no Satan, and no one is guilty except for the rich mobsters who have been manipulating the masses since the beginning of time. Religion is nothing but a shopfront for power, duly serving the interests of growth economics and the voracious power structures that deliver it.

The corrosive power of the Mind Prison is immense. The truth is not simply adjusted or distorted to fit the events. It is completely reimagined and rewritten. Thousands of years after the formation of religions we are still much better at remembering fake scenes from the Bible which took place in the distant past, than acknowledging the modern, biblical climate catastrophes and genocides taking place right here, right now. Narratives of blame and guilt, however fake, are always much more powerful than reality: they attribute responsibility, and secure closure. They stick to our brains, are passed down through generations, and become essential components of a nation’s cultural tradition and reason to exist.