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Sol Luckman Quotes

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Famous Sol Luckman Quotes

“The observer effect puts our everyday perceptions and assumptions in a blender. It dictates—if we’re to be honest with ourselves, sober in our thinking, and not reactionary in our emotions—that the world we see is NOT the ultimate reality, but merely a projection of it. From this perspective the manifest world is revealed as what Hindu mystics referred to as maya, illusion, the imaginal outpourings of minds—like children naturally playing in magical constructs that seem eminently real—simply doing what minds do.”

“If our desire is to enjoy and perhaps eventually transcend the Matrix, we must select with great circumspection the thoughts we wish to energize and direct our focus only toward that which invigorates and empowers us. Anything else simply isn’t … worth your attention.”

“The Matrix can feel like a pretty hopeless place. I get that. Nobody in his or her right mind (a tiny minority, admittedly) wants to be caught in an endless digital labyrinth like a techno lab rat. My position is that, on at least a subliminal level, even many of the most benighted sheeple (the really stubborn ones I think of as the ‘consciously clueless’) secretly suspect that they’re corralled in a system designed to control them, to keep them in check. But I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be this way. We have the power to change our circumstances individually and maybe, just maybe, collectively.”

“I’m a nonviolent guy, but the next time some brainwashed Duracell trapped in the Matrix tells you that by curtailing our liberties the authorities are ‘just trying to protect us,’ please do yourself and freedom a favor by sucker-punching them in their lying jaw.”

“Where we direct our attentive focus shapes and informs—literally and materially—our experienced reality. Prolonged attention creates greater intensity. Like a magnifying glass intensifying the sun’s rays, our attention amplifies whatever it focuses on. If we’re to be responsible creators of our experience, as opposed to haphazard victims of it, it’s incumbent on us to … attentively choose our path through the Matrix with utmost … attention to detail.”

“We live in a sort of Matrix—one of our own manipulated mental making. Our emotions, thoughts and beliefs are the raw power that can be focused to create our experience of reality. To begin breaking free (individually before even so much as contemplating doing this collectively), we must stop taking the black pill of skepticism and down the red pill of introspection. Only then, by exercising our will, can we resist the temptation to deny our true potential using the blue pill and, instead, graduate to the white pill of transcendence. Less poetically, our task is to confront the limitations of our own belief systems, and the resultant intellectual constructs, and dismantle the bars and wires of our self-imposed prison. To do this requires looking inside as responsible agents of change, not outside as victims of a world beyond our control.”

“Society’s members are psychically pressured into defining ‘true’ and ‘right’ based not on personal experience or direct gnosis (inner knowing), but on what the creators of social discourse put forward as ‘true’ and ‘right’—in other words, what to believe in—even in the absence of genuine logic or compelling evidence. This situation leads—almost inevitably, it would seem—to the creation of a certain kind of top-down, pyramidal structure that controls society, culture and, given enough free rein, eventually the world itself.”

“The heroic quest typically highlights a seemingly average person (think Thomas Anderson before he becomes Neo) who embarks on a perilous undertaking, confronts challenges and temptations, and ultimately returns to his or her starting place, transformed and usually upgraded. This myth appears central to human experience. The Tarot, for example, which reads as a distillation of ancient mythology, is in essence about the heroic quest to become one’s true self. Even the parable of the Prodigal Son can be interpreted as a retelling of the Hero’s Journey. This journey isn’t merely external; it’s primarily internal. The Hero’s Journey, applied to our Matrix analogy, suggests that the only way out of the so-called simulation is into oneself. The hero’s ultimate inner battle is against the enemy within, the shadow self, our own Agent Smith, the unrecognized and unintegrated aspects of the psyche that only battle and hinder us until we make peace with them.”

“I’m all for awareness, critical thinking, even healthy doses of skepticism. But in the end, I don’t feel that the “information war” is a battle worth fighting because it simply can’t be won. The Dragon can’t be defeated on its own turf (the Matrix) using its own “operating system” (the installed one we think of as our minds). As powerful as he was, not even Neo could defeat the Architect when he finally “met his maker.” Heck, he couldn’t even overpower his shadow, Agent Smith, until he wised up and simply stopped fighting.”

“One could argue that the observer effect is the primary energetic dynamic of ‘reality’ itself. This effect showcases the eminently malleable nature of the LEGO pieces of our world—atoms—as material objects that appear to become so only through an act of creative focus. This may strain credulity, but at the fundamental level of energy, it’s just how ‘things’ are.”

“There comes a time, a sort of epiphany … when you realize that everything you’ve discovered through your ‘research’ has basically been fed to you because you’ve been looking for it! We’re in a complex feedback loop ... that reveals to us an imaginary ‘reality’ that we choose to buy into … just before it becomes our lived ‘reality.”

“The very act of doubting our reality indicates a flicker of suspicion, a seed of uncertainty germinating in our subconscious. Perhaps this nagging sense of unease, this wondering if something isn’t altogether as it should be, is a clue, a whisper from the wellspring of our being that there’s more to this existence than meets the eye.”

“What if the world we inhabit—with all its confounding complexities and contradictions—is nothing more than an elaborate stage set, a grand illusion orchestrated by a poorly understood force? If this were true, how could we possibly know for certain? What signs or signals might betray the actual nature of our world and our place in it?”