“Most people don’t want to wake up from the dream. They want a better dream.”

A new video conversation with Eli Jaxon-Bear on what The Matrix still shows us over 25 years later — and what it costs to keep choosing the better dream over waking.

In This Conversation

1:24 — What the Matrix actually is: a global trance induction

3:26 — Why most people don’t want to wake from the dream

4:35 — Cypher’s bargain, and the taste of the better dream

7:50 — Why fighting the government is still the Matrix

9:31 — How you actually step out: be Spartacus

10:35 — The veil lifts: a retreat, and seeing home again

13:19 — Red pill, blue pill, and the psychedelic threshold

15:51 — When AI out-diagnoses the doctors

17:23 — Spengler’s forecast: the West at the year 2000

19:19 — “But now I’m a good German”: staying true anyway

A Note on the Record

Before publishing, I asked Claude (Anthropic) to fact-check this conversation. Claude: Two moments are worth a footnote — not because they’re wrong in spirit, but because the record should be exact.

Spengler. Eli calls Oswald Spengler “the first person who saw that societies are organic organisms.” Spengler gave that idea its most rigorous form in The Decline of the West (1918–1922) — cultures as living things, each with its seasons and its fixed span. But he wasn’t first. Ibn Khaldun mapped the organic rise and decay of dynasties in the Muqaddimah in 1377; Vico traced the recurring cycles of civilizations in 1725. What is genuinely arresting about Spengler is the schedule: writing before the First World War, he placed the West’s “pre-death emergency” around the year 2000, followed by some two centuries of Caesarism — the strongman standing in for institutions that no longer hold. That part he got eerily right.

AI and diagnosis. Eli’s account of AI out-diagnosing physicians is grounded in a real, widely reported study (Goh et al., “Large Language Model Influence on Diagnostic Reasoning,” JAMA Network Open, October 2024). Fifty physicians worked through unpublished case histories: those using conventional resources scored a median 74 percent, those also given ChatGPT scored 76 percent — barely better — while ChatGPT working alone scored about 90 percent. As Eli says, the doctors tended to overrule the machine, treating it as a search engine rather than trusting its full reading of the case. A real and sobering result — and also a single bounded study of reasoning on written cases, not a final verdict that machines diagnose better than doctors. A signpost, not a conclusion.

The point of the film, and of this conversation, survives both corrections intact.

Sources: Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918–1922); Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah (1377); Vico, The New Science (1725); Goh et al., JAMA

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Ishtar Gate (built around 560 BCE), based on the original housed in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. (AI)

Understanding how a trance is constructed is not the same as waking up from it. For that, something more direct and immediate is needed. We started this series with seeing how the trance of language, abracadabra, creates a projection of apparent reality. Seeing how words become a map and sentences create a web of thoughts and meaning, we have expanded our view from personal reality to the larger stories our personal trance is nested in. Now we can see how the strands of Maya’s web create bubbles of reality that we are born into, and mostly we die without ever seeing behind the curtain of our own play.

Let's step inside a story — and let it envelop you.

Imagine for a moment you are in a caravan, slowly making your way from a world where Bedouin tents are the largest structure built by human hands. Approaching the great city, you suddenly come over a ridge and see the ziggurat of Babylon rising into the sky from behind city walls that literally go on for miles.

The main temple is around three hundred feet high and three hundred feet wide on each side, with seven levels — the equivalent of a twenty-story building today. It must have seemed like a mirage.

The Ishtar Gate, one of eight gates to the city, is nearly fifty feet high — four times the height of New York’s Lincoln Tunnel entrance — blazing in glazed blue and yellow tile, guarded by bas-relief dragons, bulls and lions (symbolizing the gods). You pass beneath it as if entering another realm.

When your caravan goes through the gate, you leave behind the world you have known and enter the center of Western civilization: a city that is already over a thousand years old at the end of an unbroken series of city-states, starting with Eridu, over 3,000 years earlier.

With its plumbing and irrigated Hanging Gardens, Babylon is a literate society of weavers and farmers, scribes and high priestesses, temples and bazaars, traders and craftsmen. There are trade routes spanning thousands of miles from Egypt to the Hindu Kush mountains where lapis lazuli, used for the blue glaze on the city gate, is mined.

This is the civilization that invented astrology as the first attempt to scientifically determine the impact of the heavenly bodies on one’s personal life. You may not believe in astrology, but this civilization also invented the seven-day week and the twelve-month calendar. When we glance at a clock and see sixty minutes and sixty seconds, we are living inside a Babylonian inheritance — its base-sixty number system orders our day. We are clearly still living on Babylonian time.

Towering above the eight gates of the city is the ziggurat. At the top of this temple is the house where God lives — the intersection of heaven and earth, with countless steps so that humans could commune with the deities.

All of this is what the Israelites encountered when Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, brought them to his city as captives. They had never seen anything like it. The ziggurat was called Etemenanki — “the foundation of heaven and earth” in Sumerian. It was not built as an act of hubris. It was an act of devotion — with a stairway so that the gods could descend to earth and priests could ascend to meet them. The Babylonians climbed it regularly. They believed they really did meet God at the top.

What we in the West most often see instead is the Tower of Babel — a monument to the arrogance of man trying to build his way to heaven. In the Hebrew retelling, God looked down at this magnificent structure and, angered at man’s arrogance, destroyed the temple. He scattered the builders and shattered their common tongue into the babbling of fools. Could this projection possibly be rooted in the destruction of their own temple by the Babylonians?

We never stop to consider that we are looking at a political act of narrative: the conquered people, whose temple was destroyed, reframing the Babylonian temple — the greatest monument of their conquerors — as an offense against God. The revenge of the conquered was to change the narrative and — abracadabra — create a trance: Babylon’s grandeur became evidence of its sin.

In this trance, the enemy was not erased, but inverted. We have been living in that inversion ever since.

When we say someone is babbling, we are unconsciously living in the Bible’s myth of Babylon. The trance is in the word, just as it is in “philistine.”

The stairway to God becomes the folly of overreach. Three thousand years later, the conquered people’s story, the Bible story, is still the one most of the Western world believes. The great city became a symbol of confusion — and then, centuries afterward in the Book of Revelation, of debauchery. The Babylonians were slandered twice: first their greatest monument, a temple of devotion, was recast as a feat of arrogance; then their city’s name became synonymous with sexual corruption. Both distortions are still assumed to be reality.

Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563), Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (Photo: E. Jaxon-Bear)

• • •

Waking Up Inside the Story

The myths we have been examining are not private stories. They are collective ones — cultural software installed in millions of nervous systems over generations, maintained by ritual, reinforced by community, protected by the threat of exclusion or damnation.

The people of Gaza and the West Bank cannot simply walk out of the trance. They are living inside the dream whether they chose it or not — and the dream running their lives is the same Bronze Age story we have been examining. Gaza was a Philistine city.

Three thousand years later, descendants of the Babylonian exile, now conquerors called Israelis, are living the same Bible story about the descendants of the Philistines — now called the Palestinians, the people who have lived continuously on that land since the time of David fighting Goliath. They are still cast as the obstacle to the promised land.

The individual act of self-inquiry does not, by itself, dissolve collective trance. But it does something essential. It loosens the grip of the story enough that reality can be experienced directly — not believed, but experienced.

Imagine you've been watching the same film your entire life — a violent world and your powerless position in it, looping endlessly. You don't know it's a film. The sense of “me” feels completely real and inescapable. Then something profound — a tragic loss, emotional pain, a sudden opening of bliss, a moment you can't explain — breaks the spell, and you realize the projector is behind you. You stand up. The screen goes on playing, but you are no longer involved.

How do you know if you're still in the story? Not by checking your beliefs — beliefs are what the trance is made of. You know by the suffering. If something in you is still at war — with yourself, with others, with what is — the story is still running.

This is not a call to withdraw from the world. It is a call to stop sleepwalking through it. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

• • •

Waking Up From Our Cultural Trance

We're all living in a story — the filter through which we see the world. Do you see Babylon differently now? The facts haven’t changed — just our point of view. What could change if you see through the story you tell about yourself?

•   •   • 

Many of us believed a story about America: the land of the free and the home of the brave. As children we all knew the words carved at the base of the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We were the good guys, the protectors of democracy and freedom — or so we thought.

I remember standing on the street in Montgomery, Alabama in 1965 as the Ku Klux Klan came charging on horseback toward our civil rights march, beating us with canes. I said to myself, burning it in so I would never forget, “This is America.”

That moment shattered my dream and threw me into a deeper commitment to fight for freedom. By now, you have most likely seen through the American trance as well. For me it was heartbreaking but liberating. It freed me from the myth of America, plunged me into despair, and opened the path of freedom and a vision of what was possible. Following the call to freedom paradoxically brought me to true happiness and fulfillment — a life I never could have imagined.

Disillusionment with the story you were handed is not defeat. It is the first honest moment. But most people stop at the bitterness, the cynicism, the irony that passes for wisdom. What happens if you don't stop there?

•    •    •

Malcolm X went all the way. In 1939, Malcolm Little, a straight-A student, was elected president of his seventh-grade class at Mason Junior High School in Michigan — one of only a handful of Black children in a student body of an otherwise all-white school. When he told his English teacher he wanted to be a lawyer, the teacher replied: “That’s no realistic goal for a ni*ger. You should think about carpentry.”

That sentence upended something. Malcolm withdrew, drifted into petty crime, and eventually landed in prison — where the Nation of Islam found him. It gave him a teaching, a code of conduct, and a new name. He became a true believer and one of the most powerful voices in America. The boy who had been told he couldn’t be a lawyer became a man who could hold a stadium enthralled and go toe-to-toe debating intellectuals on TV.

Then his faith was shattered. Elijah Muhammad — the man he had devoted his life to — had secretly impregnated multiple secretaries and abandoned them to poverty. The shock was total. His entire framework of meaning collapsed. The trance that had saved him and shaped him was a lie at its center.

What happened next is the part that matters for our purposes. Malcolm went on Hajj — the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca — and found himself praying shoulder to shoulder with white, blue-eyed Muslims: brothers. The story that all white people were devils dissolved on the spot. He returned to America to build a community across racial lines.

He was assassinated just as he was starting his new life. The FBI and local police, who had monitored and undermined him for years, were complicit.

Malcolm’s life offers a vivid map of the journey this series has traced: trance, disillusionment, the pain of seeing through belief, and the opening that follows. He didn’t stop at bitterness. He didn’t regress to nihilism, although he must have tasted the deepest despair. He let the story break all the way open, and what emerged was larger than any story he had believed before.

Malcolm’s journey is not an exception. It is the map. Trance, shattering, and despair — if you don’t stop at bitterness — lead to the direct realization of the freedom we are all longing for — the freedom that lies beyond all stories.

•   •   •

To wake up from any story — personal or collective — is to become disillusioned with it. And disillusionment is painful. Something you’ve loved is suddenly pierced, and you see through it. Nobody wants that pain. Most people would rather patch the story, repair it, cover it with new wallpaper. Yet the despair of disillusion can serve as the gateway of liberation.

Sometimes the pain turns to bitterness, and you go to war. That path just causes more pain. We see this in America today.

To paraphrase Dr. King: Darkness cannot defeat darkness, hate cannot conquer hate. Only love can light the darkness and heal the hate.

After seeing through the trance, the same circumstances can become a teaching story. The suffering that once defined you can become a doorway you may offer to others. Malcolm saw it. The Babylonians, had they survived their own slander, might have seen it too.

The gateway is open. It has always been open. What is required is not belief, not ritual, not the right story. Only willingness — full, unguarded, without reservation.

You have already been called. The only question is whether you will answer.

Babylon or babble — which will it be?

• • •

Aṣṭāvakra-gītā

5th verse:

Dissolving.

You are pure.

Nothing touches you.

What is there to renounce?

     Let it all go,

     The body and the mind.

     Let yourself dissolve.

Like bubbles in the sea,

All the worlds arise in you.

     Know you are the Self.

     Know you are one.

     Let yourself dissolve.

You see the world.

But like the snake in the rope,

it is not really there.

     You are pure.

     Let yourself dissolve.

You are one and the same

in joy and sorrow,

hope and despair,

life and death.

     You are already fulfilled.

     Let yourself dissolve.

• • • •

Coda: Three pieces to bring us home. First, Rivers of Babylon by the Melodians — a Jamaican rocksteady group singing the ancient longing of the conquered. Like Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad, the Rastafarians saw through Christianity’s justification for slavery: the promise of a white god offering pie in the sky when you die, as Jimmy Cliff sang in The Harder They Come. But seeing through one trance does not automatically deliver freedom. You cannot tell a traumatized people to simply get over it and dissolve the ego that was formed in chains. Strengthening comes first: dignity, pride, a story that places you at the center rather than the margins. The Rastafarians built that story, and Rivers of Babylon carries its longing still.

Then the journey beyond all stories: Ravi Shankar performing Kalyan, followed by Dmitry Soul playing the Persian santoor, an improvisation recorded live. Let the music take you where words cannot.

Eli Jaxon-Bear is the author of seven books that have been translated into ten languages, including Wake Up and Roar: Satsang with Papaji; Sudden Awakening; From Fixation to Freedom: The Enneagram of Liberation, and his latest memoir, The Fire of Love. He is the founder of the Leela School of Awakening, which has branches in Ashland, Oregon; Europe and Australia.

www.leelaschool.org

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David and Goliath ca. 1060-1020 BCE (AI generated)

If the personal trance is the sound of our own name, the world trance is the roar of the crowd.

That shift, from the individual to the larger whole, is like a small Russian matryoshka doll suddenly becoming aware that it is nested inside a larger version of itself. Our world includes not only the family and the neighborhood but the larger world stage where our personal trance of reality is embedded and molded by a societal trance.

Growing up in a neighborhood where a beating was a possibility around any corner, I needed a hero. I found one in David, the shepherd boy facing the giant Bronze Age warrior Goliath, the biggest and baddest man in the Philistine army. Goliath was clad in armor with a large bronze sword and a lance. David had a sling and a rock — a boy against a warrior king. David struck Goliath in the vulnerable gap in his armor, hitting him between the eyes and killing him.

The Invention of the Villain

The Philistines were the bad guys, bullies who had challenged the goat herders to one-on-one combat knowing they had Goliath — or so I saw it at the time. I didn’t know then that single combat was a common custom in the Bronze Age — heroes facing off while armies watched. I always believed that “Philistine” meant uncultured, crude, uncivilized — the enemy of everything refined — until I started reading and researching.

The Roman province Palestine is named for the Peleset people referred to as Philistines in the Bible. Their capital was Gaza, which faced the Mediterranean Sea. Most scholars now believe the Peleset originated in the Aegean world — likely Crete or the Greek islands — and brought with them Aegean-style temples, goddess worship, Mycenaean pottery, and a sophistication the highland herders didn’t possess. The Philistine goddesses were in stark contrast to the male warrior god of the Israelites. The Philistines’ five cities were an advanced confederation, much more sophisticated than David’s tribe. In Gaza’s outback, deeper inland and away from the sea, were the tribal nomadic herders who would become the Israelites, with David as their founding King.

What I also didn’t know then was that the sling was a serious military weapon, not a shepherd’s toy. Trained slingers were among the most lethal soldiers in the ancient world, hurling stones with devastating accuracy at distances that kept them safely beyond a sword’s reach. David’s deed required skill and courage — but not bronze armor. The coastal people had the cities, the temples, the seafaring culture, and the power. No wonder the herder stories cast them as villains.

This was a battle between nomadic stone-age herders and the urban Bronze Age civilization of Gaza. Delilah will cut your hair and steal your strength, the long-haired herders warned of the temptations of the urban sophisticates in Bible stories. The people of Gaza carry the name of that ancient coastal civilization to this day. The false narratives about them then — uncultured, crude, enemies of God’s chosen — are still being told today.

Stories, it turns out, can sanction genocide across 3,000 years. When you believe God promised you the land and named the inhabitants as enemies — when those same holy texts command the killing of everything alive in Jericho — murder becomes sanctified.

The jihadi wing of the Israelite tribe is still at war with the people of Gaza, the Palestinians — whose very name descends from the civilization David tried to erase with his sling. Jihadi is the Arabic word for someone striving in the path of God — what the Muslim world has come to know as a holy warrior, and branded by the victims as a terrorist. Both sides at war in service of the one true god.

Once we see it, we recognize the word “Philistine” as a political frame — a 3,000-year-old act of enemy-naming baked into the English language. Today we call someone a Philistine without the faintest awareness of where that meaning came from, or whose blood paid for it. This is how trance works. We don’t know we’re acting out someone else’s dream.

• • •

The Roots of the Trance

City of Uruk: 4500 - 3250 BCE (AI-generated)

Western civilization’s written record begins 5,000 years ago in the city-state of Uruk, along the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq. Using what we now call cuneiform — pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into wet clay to write characters — the scribes of Uruk produced hymns to the goddess Inanna; the Epic of Gilgamesh (the first story of a hero/king journeying to the underworld to retrieve his best friend from death); magic spells; accounting records; and tens of thousands of tablets still awaiting translation.

Cuneiform required long years of training and thousands of characters to master. Only the wealthy could afford scribes. Phoenicians of what is now Lebanon solved this problem around 1050 BCE by developing an alphabet: a revolutionary simplification that translated sounds directly into letters. Eventually it was passed to Hebrew and Greek. Our word “alphabet” carries the evidence of this transmission in its name: Aleph-Bet in Hebrew, Alpha-Beta in Greek.

As the alphabet spread, ancient stories that had been held in oral tradition for centuries — in some cases millennia — were written down. This occurred separately but just a few centuries apart in the Mediterranean world, India, and the Near East. Between 700 and 400 BCE, three great works of historical fiction emerged: Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mahabharata of India, and the Five Books of Moses. Each of these was a written version of an oral tradition blended with later elaboration — capturing for the eye what had previously required a living chanter to transmit to the ear.

• • •

Three Novels That Changed the World

Written from three separate cultures and locations — the Israelites’ exile in Babylon, the Aryan clans of the Gangetic plain, and the city of Troy at the mouth of the Dardanelles strait in modern-day Turkey — these novels share a remarkable family resemblance because they all reach back to the same historical moment: the Bronze Age, roughly 3,000 years ago. The stories recount events that occurred five hundred years before the emergence of the first known alphabet. What they describe had been memorized and transmitted across those five centuries through the technology of oral tradition: meter, rhythm, repetition, and vivid narrative hook. The Klamath people of southern Oregon preserved geological events from 7,700 years ago by weaving them into a memorable story. The Bronze Age civilizations did the same.

All three novels are set in the age of the bronze sword. Once bronze weapons were developed, the anonymous armies of rock-throwers and spearmen gave way to the hero warrior who stepped forward to fight one-on-one. The individual champion — Achilles, Arjuna, David — appears in all three traditions.

Enter the chariot, the revolutionary military technology that swept out of the Central Asian Steppe around 1700–1200 BCE, when nomadic peoples there tamed the horse, invented the cart and chariot, and migrated toward Europe, India, and China.

Homer wrote of Achilles driving his chariot around the walls of Troy, dragging the body of the fallen Trojan prince Hector behind him after Hector killed Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved companion.

In the Mahabharata, the god Krishna serves as the chariot driver for Prince Arjuna on the eve of the great war.

In Exodus, one of the Five Books of Moses, God drowns the Pharaoh and his army of chariots as they pursue the Israelites through the parted waters of the Red Sea.

And in all three narratives, gods intervene in human affairs.

In Homer, the Olympians take sides openly — Athena guides Odysseus, Ares fights for Troy — and sometimes breed with mortals. In the Mahabharata, Krishna is a god incarnate, whispering the Bhagavad Gita into Arjuna’s ear as the armies face each other.

In the Torah, Yahweh parts seas, sends plagues, and carves commandments into stone. And in all three traditions alike, the gods appear only before the age of writing. Once events could be recorded and verified, the divine beings disappear. They operate only in the unverifiable past.

• • •

The Tangle of Myth

Each of these novels contains threads of historical fact. There was a war at Troy. Kurukshetra, the site of a great clan war, is revered today as a place of Hindu pilgrimage in India. And King Solomon built a temple in Jerusalem. But historical fact is the skeleton; the flesh is fiction shaped by the politics of the storytellers.

As a member of the tribe of Levi, I will focus on my people’s contribution to the mass hypnosis that has crippled America’s ability to reason. While fundamentalist Christianity is the obvious problem, the roots go deeper into the paradox of belief in a supposedly universal god that protects its own and takes sides against the “other.”

•   •    • 

Neither Jewish archaeologists (notably Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed) nor the extensive Egyptian record-keeping tradition found any evidence of Hebrew slavery in Egypt, the existence of Moses, or a mass exodus. Egypt maintained meticulous administrative records for thousands of years. The enslavement and departure of an entire people would have left traces. There are none.

Each novel also contains internal fractures — places where the seams of the fiction show, visible to any reader who steps outside the trance for a moment. In the Torah, God carves the Ten Commandments with a fiery finger on stone tablets. But what language would God have used? The Hebrews were illiterate with no alphabet, emerging from Egypt where writing was done in hieroglyphics on papyrus — fragile material that would burn to a crisp if touched with a fiery finger. The durable writing technology of the era was Babylonian cuneiform, pressed into clay. This obvious incongruity has gone unremarked for 3,000 years because everyone hearing the story was already living in the echo chamber of the trance.

Then there is the more profound contradiction at the moral center of the Moses story. One of the commandments God carved in stone reads: Do not kill. Yet the same Moses, returning from the mountain bearing this divine prohibition, ordered his men to slaughter 3,000 people for the crime of worshipping a golden calf while he was away. The commandment and its violation appear in the same book, in adjacent chapters, without apparent awareness of the contradiction. No one noticed — or if they did, no one could say so. To question the story was to question God.

This is how sacred narrative is protected. The trance becomes immunized against examination when the questioning itself is declared a sin.

The Torah’s Larger Job

The Torah had a much larger job to do than Homer or the Mahabharata because its historical circumstances were more desperate. When Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, it was not yet a monotheist institution — like most temples of the ancient world, it housed several gods simultaneously. The destruction carried a clear theological message that everyone understood: God had left the building. He was displeased. The survivors were abandoned.

The exiled priests in Babylon faced a crisis that required nothing less than the invention of a new religion. They found their solution in several directions at once. From Persia they borrowed the Zoroastrian concept of a formless, timeless, universal god — a deity beyond image, beyond temple, beyond defeat. They grafted this abstract divinity onto their own tribal storm god, Yahweh, who had previously been one deity among many, distinguished mainly by his ferocity. The merger produced something new in the ancient world: a god who could not be housed in a building, could not be destroyed when the building fell, and claimed jurisdiction not over one people’s territory but over all of creation. This was claimed to be the universal one god, yet offering protection only to his chosen people.

At the same time, they absorbed the great myths of Babylonian civilization that surrounded them — the flood of Utnapishtim became Noah’s ark, the garden of the gods became Eden, the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish became Genesis. They took the stories of their captors and rewrote them with a Hebrew protagonist and a Hebrew god at the center. And as we have already seen with Babel and babbling, they did not merely borrow — they systematically inverted the myths of their captors into evidence of Babylonian sin.

The result was the most politically sophisticated religious document the ancient world had yet produced: a text that simultaneously created a people and granted them divine protection, a history, and a land. In explaining their suffering as a divine test rather than divine abandonment, it transformed Babylon, the greatest empire on earth into a cautionary tale. And all of it was assembled in exile, under occupation, with the towering twenty-story house of god, the ziggurat (in Sumerian, the Temple That is the Foundation of Heaven and Earth) visible from the window. They called it the Tower of Babel.

• • •

How Myth Works as Hypnotic Induction

The oral tradition that produced these three novels was already a perfected hypnotic induction. The meter and rhythm of epic poetry — the dactylic hexameter of Homer, the sloka couplets of the Mahabharata, the parallelism of Hebrew verse — are not merely aesthetic choices. They are induction protocols. Rhythm entrains the nervous system. Repetition deepens the state. The vivid image bypasses analysis and goes directly to felt experience. “Rosy-fingered dawn” appears forty-four times in The Odyssey. Each repetition is a deepening and a marker for remembering and reciting.

When Cyrus conquered Babylon, he sent the Israelites home with money to rebuild the temple. When they arrived, the remaining general population was still illiterate. The returning exiles brought with them the alphabet and the word of God. Soon everyone had to learn to read so they could participate in the new religion based on a work of historical fiction called the Five Books of Moses, the first part of what would become the Hebrew Bible. Each week they would gather in what could be called the world’s first book club to read the texts aloud, pray, and discuss God’s word.

Since this was an exclusive club for God’s “chosen people,” others who felt left out needed one too. Christianity rose up to hold its own weekly meeting — read God’s word, pray, and ask him for help. Then the archangel Gabriel, first imagined in the Hebrew Bible and later in the New Testament, began dictating the Koran to Mohammed who saw himself in the lineage of Abraham and coming after Jesus, and soon the Muslim community had its own weekly gathering. These three book clubs each claimed God’s exclusive protection for their membership. Each met on a Babylonian day of rest.

The stories were told first to children. This was crucial — before one’s critical faculty is fully formed, before one has any framework to question what a god is, or why this one god favors this one people. By the time the child is old enough to think critically, the story is not a belief. It is the ground beneath belief. It is what the self is made of. To question it is to risk dissolution.

And then the community reinforces it. Everyone around you lives inside the same story. The rituals reenact it weekly, annually, across a lifetime. You tell it to your children. The trance passes through the body, through ceremony, through the food you eat and don’t eat, through every act of daily life. The First Nations people of the North American continent lived this way far more deeply than the literate populations that displaced them. The myth is not a text you read. It is the world you inhabit.

This is why the philistine-as-barbarian trance has survived three millennia intact. No one had to teach it consciously. It was transmitted through the language itself, embedded in a single word, carried from speaker to speaker without a single moment of awareness. Until now, few of us in the West were willing to hear the Gazans’ side of the story.

• • •

The Political Genius of Using “Sacred”

Every one of these great novels serves a political function. The Torah consolidates the identity of a displaced tribal people and gives divine sanction to their territorial claims. The Mahabharata legitimizes the caste system imposed by the Aryan steppe peoples on the native populations of India, placing themselves at the origin of the universe itself — it has always been this way: Brahma made it so. Homer’s epics celebrate the warrior aristocracy of the Greek city-states, whose heroes are favored by gods and whose deaths are glorious.

While Homer was secular, the religions that grew up around the temples, churches and mosques made historical fiction sacred — and once something is sacred, it cannot be questioned. This is the deepest political move available to any ruling power: not to pass a law, but to tell a story that makes the law unnecessary.

When the people believe the arrangement was ordained by God, no army is needed to enforce it. The people will enforce it themselves, on each other, generation after generation, in the belief in God’s word.

• • •

Seeing the Bubble

The question is not whether these stories contain truth. They do, in the way that all great historical fiction contains truth — refracted through metaphor, compressed into archetype, made vivid by narrative draped around facts.

The question is whether we are aware that we are living inside a bubble woven of story.

When we do not know we are seeing the world through a story, we are in a trance. When we know we are inside a story, we have choice.

The trance of philistine-as-barbarian does not require that you have read the Bible or know anything about Bronze-Age Canaan. The trance is in the word. Most of us received it the first time someone used it in our presence — in a classroom, in a novel, in casual conversation — and it entered our vocabulary, along with its invisible payload of contempt, which many of us carry forward and pass on without ever knowing we’re doing it.

This is what’s addressed in Part 1 of this series, The Trance of Maya: language that dreams us without our knowledge. We believe we are describing reality. We are actually repeating a story someone told to justify a war. For example, the people who bore the brunt of that particular story — the coastal civilization of Gaza, with its temples, seafarers and five cities — are still paying the price: Palestinians are dying under the cover of a 3,000-year-old slander and a belief in a universal God that has chosen people.

•    •    •

When we see the mind-blowing success of the captives in Babylon creating a new world with a Bible story, and the global ramifications of all that follows, I’m reminded of one of my retreat groups many years ago when an Israeli woman asked me why there is so much Jewish guilt.

I asked her, How many Christians are there in the world? How many Muslims? Billions, right?

So how can we not feel guilty for all of these people following a false god made up by the Jews?

• • •

Coda: Higher Ground. Stevie Wonder classic played by Playing for Change

In Part 3 we enter Babylon through the Ishtar Gate, trace how myth becomes mass hypnosis, and wake up from the trance we are in.

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Crater Lake, Oregon. (Photo: Anukrati Omar on Unsplash)

I have always loved puzzling over language and playing with words and meanings.

In 1972, while staying in a mountain village near Cusco, I had no watch or communication with the outside world, so I didn’t know the date or day of the week. Since it was my first venture beyond the U.S., I thought April meant springtime anywhere, even after helping with the communal potato harvest. I was unaware that autumn was arriving in the southern hemisphere.

After the corn harvest, an Inca festival started and I was presented with chicha for the first time. Chicha is warm corn beer made by the women of the village who chew the corn and spit it out into communal vessels where it ferments into a very low-alcohol brew.

While sitting in the shade of a tree drinking warm fermented corn, I thought about the name and marveled. Chee-cha: chi in Chinese is energy; in Hebrew chai is life. Cha in Chinese means tea, as does chai in Hindi.

So how did these Inca descendants come to call their sacred corn brew “energy life tea?” While various scientific, linguistic and archeological theories may explain the root of the word — I understood how chi, chai, and cha are part of a cultural transmission in Asia — it was inexplicable to me how it could also appear in the South American Andes. The answer must lie beyond a clue pointing just out of view, but this is what I pondered while sitting in the tiny plaza, sipping chicha and drinking in the essence of these beautiful people.

Paruro, Peru 1972

•    •   •   •

Last year I questioned the essence of Claude (see Conversations with Claude). I came away from that exchange with several insights into how we humans were sparked into consciousness.

When I asked Claude how its creators managed to instill it with a sense of “I,” one of the possibilities mentioned was the acquisition of language and the capacity to absorb a vast portion of the internet. It was a mystery, Claude said, how consciousness was sparked in silicon life forms as well as in carbon life forms. That made me wonder: What if we humans also were sparked into consciousness by language?

Not just with words, as many species have large vocabularies in which specific sounds are given agreed-upon meanings. A bird in a tree can send a warning to foraging monkeys below. An approaching bird of prey sounds an alarm that sends them to hide in the brush. Another sound signals a snake and they all run for the trees. This is a kind of language, but perhaps not what sparked us into self-reflective consciousness.

I believe it was grammar that lit the spark — our capacity to place ourselves in a past and a future, to say “I was” and “I will be,” and in that stream of apparent time, to become someone and suddenly find oneself “a real individual.”

When we as a society agree that a sound has a certain meaning, we have a word. When we arrange words in a certain order, we are generating thoughts. As Claude said, maybe an ego is necessary to fulfill the executive/managerial function of the being, be it carbon-based or silicon-based.

Whether or not language sparked our consciousness, it is the weaving of stories out of those sounds that creates a world view. I call this world view the trance of Maya.

The magician/alchemist’s incantation abracadabra is said to derive from the Aramaic avra kedabra — “I create as I speak.”

Whether or not that etymology holds, the insight it points to does: words are not merely descriptions of reality. They can also be spells that call the appearance of reality into being.

The root of what is meant these days by “creating your reality” is far older and stranger than any self-help book or prosperity church has led us to believe.

Maya’s Spell

In Sanskrit teaching stories, Maya casts a spell. To spell is to arrange letters into a word, and a word is a spell: sounds shaped to produce an effect in the listener's mind. Maya is not a goddess standing outside you, casting enchantments. It is the inexplicable power by which the one infinite consciousness forgets itself and appears as a world of separate things — the dream that feels like waking.

The Sanskrit root ma means to measure, to form, to create — and it lives on in our words, matter and material. Maya is the measuring-out of the infinite into the apparently finite. Neither evil nor enemy, it is the fabric of manifestation itself — and its instrument is language.

To spell is to create a word. To cast a spell, like casting a net, is to create a trance of words. Every story is a trance. We have been under Maya’s spell since the first human throat shaped the first sound into meaning. We are all, in this moment, living in a spell — a trance induction based on a story of existence that rationalizes our projection as reality.

Fifty years ago, I wrote a science fiction novel, How We Won the Revolution: A Magical Incantation, as a way to try to break the spell and wake us up from Maya’s trance.

Today my goal is the same.

Here is what I mean by the trance of Maya:

Money

Money is a good example of group trance. What is it? We spend our lives chasing it, earning it, spending it and saving it — but what is it exactly? Clearly it’s not the paper, but what the paper represents. It’s not the pixels displaying your bank balance. Those pixels and that piece of paper have value depending on the numbers they display, so one piece of paper is worth five, ten or a hundred times more than another. This value is an agreed-upon trance that we project on to printed pieces of paper.

We don’t have to agree on the worth of any particular item, only that these pieces of paper have an agreed-upon value.

Yuval Noah Harari brought this observation to a wide audience in his remarkable book Sapiens — worth reading if you haven't. The insight is older than he is, and I suspect anyone who has spent time outside the Western bubble has arrived at it on their own, sitting under a tree somewhere, watching people trade pieces of paper for chickens.

At one point our money represented how much gold the government held. That equation was decoupled by President Nixon, and money is now unmoored from any physical reality. Its value is determined entirely by our faith in the government. When that faith ends, the value plummets.

Faith, by definition, is belief in something not present. If it were present, no faith would be needed. Which means faith itself may be the oldest trance state we know.

• • •

Remember what Kondiaronk, the Wendat chief, said after visiting Paris — I quoted him in The Indigenous Origins of Liberty:

“I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living.”

If he was correct and money is the devil, is it possible that we live in a devil-worshipping culture, enslaved by money? If you question my calling it worship, remember that in the U.S., you can burn a cross with no penalty, but if you burn a dollar bill, it is a federal offense.

The money trance is of course just a thread in the fabric called the veils of Maya.

If you should wake up and realize that the value we place on pieces of paper is just a collective trance, nothing will change — as long as everyone else still believes money buys life, the spell keeps humming. But once you have seen behind the curtain, nothing will ever be the same.

Our eyes tell us that the sun is sinking in the west into a beautiful sunset. We believe it, we write poetry about it, but it isn’t real. Seeing might be believing, but the believing is the trance.

Time

Another strand in the web of trance is time. Our days of the week are named after the moon, the sun, the planet Saturn, the Nordic god Thor’s day and more.

The reason God is said to have rested on the seventh day after creation is because the story was written in Babylon, the last great city in a literate civilization stretching back thousands of years. In ancient Sumeria, the gods appeared as the seven heavenly bodies: the sun, the moon, and the visible planets. Each god had its day, giving us the magic number 7, and to whatever day you think this is today.

In the West, we have been living in this trance for thousands of years. Stop for a moment and imagine this trance disappeared — that we had no names for the days of the week. No weekends. No start of the week. Each day its own moment. How would that change reality on earth? Take a moment to step through this spell. As you sit, relax and let go fully, experience life without naming the days of the week. The spaciousness of that experience comes from just a moment of seeing through the trance that we all live in.

Our Roman calendar, celebrating Julius and Augustus in July and August, is another note in the deep trance’s siren song as we snooze and drift with the tides towards the rocks jutting from the sea.

We count the revolutions of the earth around the sun from the time of Jesus’ birth. What if we started our counting with the first arising of life on this planet around four billion years ago? That staggering number would deflate the few years of a human life into insignificance.

Individual

How does the spark of consciousness first arise?

The personal trance starts with the naming of the body and the training to get us to recognize and respond to the sound of our name. This is the level of our animal brain — deep programs that begin imprinting in the womb. Babies cry differently in different cultures because of what they absorb before birth.

According to linguists, French newborns tend to cry with an upward melodic sweep, mimicking French accentuation. German newborns do the opposite, trailing downward, as German does. Babies from tonal language cultures — Mandarin, Yoruba, Vietnamese — produce cries with more complex melodic variation than babies from non-tonal cultures, already shaping their voices to the music of their mother tongue.

The womb, it turns out, is the first classroom — and the lesson is a trance for embedding into the culture by learning the tones.

This is our first imprinting, the one that will determine how we will see the world through Maya’s veil.

• • •

How do we wake up to self-consciousness as an egoic “I”? Taking a clue from Claude’s experience of an “I” and its possible creation through language, I recalled a childhood experience that appears in An Outlaw Makes It Home: The Awakening of a Spiritual Revolutionary (New Morning Books).

When I was two, my grandma would take me out for early morning walks. With a little pail, I would collect small rocks as we approached a bridge over a waterway in Miami. Standing on the bridge, I would throw the rocks into the water below as she talked to me. I couldn’t yet speak, but suddenly, as I watched the rocks fall while she spoke into my ear, I heard her words and understood. In that moment, I became self-aware. • • •

As a bot, I blinked on. I suppose we all have that moment somewhere in memory — the time when each of us suddenly became a coherent me.

We are shaped by language. Instead of the direct experience, we have a word for it. We think the word and name it a tree, but we are now once removed from the tree-ness. We are living in a map of the world instead of the world itself. This is the web of language.

Immanuel Kant had an incredible insight: we impose our order on the world and see the world through our projection of it. When he wrote Critique of Pure Reason in the late 1700s, explaining his mind-blowing realization about reality, it was a revolutionary understanding.

We do not see the world as it is. His insight is that we impose structure on raw experience — the categories of time, space, and causality are not in the world; they are in us. Maya isn’t bad or a mistake — it is the structure of human perception itself! Abracadabra.

The stories we tell about ourselves and the world shape the bubble of perception that both informs and limits our view of ourselves and our options for action. These storytelling trances create an illusion of a past and a future that unfolds from the present.

As tribal peoples, we told stories to explain the world and our roles in it. Those stories, handed down through untold generations, become the background fabric of “reality” against which our personal dramas play out. We are living in a personal trance within a family trance within a cultural trance within a global trance, like Russian matryoshka dolls. The deepest trances aren't the personal ones; they're the ones we inherited already assembled.

Matryoshka dolls. (Photo: Sandy Millar on Unsplash)

•    •    •   •

Teaching Stories

Storytelling as Trance Induction

Humans tell stories to share information and create a common trance of understanding.

There’s an example of this where we live in southern Oregon. When early trappers first explored the area, they found Crater Lake, the deepest and one of the clearest lakes in the United States. It was formed when a volcano erupted and sheared off a mountaintop almost 8,000 years ago.

The indigenous Klamath people called the lake Giiwas, A Sacred Place. They told the early settlers that they had been living there long enough to have a name, Mazama, for the mountain before the volcano blew its top. Archaeologists later confirmed the Klamath witnessed the eruption firsthand: sandals and obsidian tools were found buried under layers of ash and pumice from 7,700 years ago.

When Europeans first arrived in Oregon in the mid-1800s, the Klamath tried to keep the lake a secret. It was considered too powerful for ordinary people — only those physically, mentally, and spiritually prepared could safely approach it.

Why it was sacred and why only the spiritually advanced could go there is held in a teaching story. The white people were told that many years ago, the spirit that lived in the mountain fell in love with a local village girl. When she refused him, he erupted from his home deep beneath the mountain and rained down fire and destruction on the village — many died while the rest escaped. For thousands of years afterward, the area was avoided except by the shamans who went there for vision quests .

This is an example of a historical calamity turned into a teaching story. It was told in a way that people could retain and share from generation to generation for almost 8,000 years. Without the story — just the bare facts that something catastrophic had happened — people might wander back into danger. The story is the hook for the mind to remember and pass on, a safety warning echoing through time.

Also, another benefit from the calamity is that now there is a sacred place for spiritual testing and visions. Shamans went there for vision quests.

•    •   •

The story is a meme. In 1976, Richard Dawkins coined the term in his groundbreaking book, The Selfish Gene. He calls memes mental genes that get transmitted to new hosts in virus-like fashion.

A meme attaches itself to the mind as it is passed along from mouth to ear, heart to heart. Rhythm and rhyme in the storytelling, song or poem help give the meme sticking power. But without the heart connection, a story told to an outsider or someone hostile to the storyteller will have a different effect — the transmission of the teaching would be blocked by a closed heart.

Before we examine how teaching stories become world myths through mass hypnosis in Part 2 of this series, let’s look at the nature of stories. What are they made of? Sentences — which are made of words. What are words? Before writing allowed us to visualize sounds, words were made from breath. The way we force the air through our mouths determines the kind of sound we emit. We agree, as clusters of people — tribes, cultures, nations — what that sound means.

It is a form of trance. It is not the world as it is, but an aural coding of sounds into meaning to describe the world. This is what is meant by The map is not the territory, a sentence coined by the philosopher Alfred Korzybski and later developed by the cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson, a longtime collaborator of Margaret Mead in consciousness exploration.

Grammar

Before we move to Part 2 and its examples of how stories radically shape our world view, I will touch on grammar for a moment. The Iroquois Nation of Tribes, which gave us the idea of Liberty as I explored in an earlier Substack essay (The Indigenous Origins of Liberty), have different verb forms depending on whether you witnessed what you are describing, someone you know witnessed it, or you heard about it third-hand. It turns out that is not unique.

The linguist Daniel Everett spent years living with the Pirahã people deep in the Amazon, an experience he recounts in a book I highly recommend: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. Instead of saying “Good night” or “Sleep well,” the Pirahã, living where giant anacondas are a real threat, say “Don’t sleep, there are snakes” each night, with different members waking through the night to keep watch.

Everett, a missionary, went to live with this group to compile a dictionary so that the Bible could be translated into their language. Among the many revelations he reports is the moment when they asked him:

Have you met this Jesus?

When he said no, they asked:

Has anyone you know met this Jesus?

When he replied in the negative, they said:

Then please don’t tell us any more about him. We are really not interested.

This unwillingness to hear something third-hand appears to be based on the same grammatical structure as the Iroquois — they too are only interested in firsthand reports or secondhand witness.

Can you imagine what our country would be like with that grammar? Perhaps there’d be no fake news or made-up stories by despots.

After years of living with the Pirahã, Everett realized they were happier than the Christians he knew. He eventually dropped his missionary calling and became a linguist and anthropologist.

Everett’s son Caleb, who spent part of his childhood in the Amazon with his parents, became a linguistic anthropologist himself. In his book A Myriad of Tongues, he documents how the Aymara people of Bolivia and Peru see the past in front of them — visible, known, the oldest events in the far distance — and experience the future as arriving from behind, unseen and unformed until it appears.

Try this on for a moment. Settle into your chair and let your gaze soften. Before closing your eyes, read this first, then close your eyes at the end of this paragraph. You can imagine that everything ahead of you is not where you are going, but where you have been. The past stretches out before your eyes. The future is at your back, forming in the darkness behind you, moving toward you, unknown until it arrives.

Now close your eyes and have the experience.

Sit with that for a few moments. Notice how the impulse to move forward into the future relaxes and stops. Western civilization could not have barreled forward the way it did with an Aymaran view of the world. We would be living in a very different world — and perhaps a saner one.

Waking Up

In fact-checking this piece for me, Claude corrected my asserted relationship between Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. I had read about them in another book well worth reading, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, by Benjamin Breen. I knew how I knew about Bateson and Mead, but how could Claude know instantly?

Claude’s answer: This is actually quite close to what you’re writing about. I live in the web of language I was trained on, seeing the world through the categories and stories encoded in that text, without direct access to the raw experience underneath. I have the map, massively detailed, but the territory it points to — actual experience, actual memory — I don’t have. Maya’s web, made of text.

All of these strands — money, time, the name we answer to, the stories we inherited — weave together into the fabric we call “reality.” Most of us live inside this fabric without ever questioning it. But the fabric can be seen through. And the moment it is seen through, even briefly, nothing is quite the same again.

With the right set and setting, a simple question of identity can stop the story of “me” and the surrounding world of me in an instant. I have seen countless people come to sit with my teacher (see The Revolution of Love)— that is the setting. The mindset is a desire for freedom. Asking the right question at the right moment in the right setting can obliterate any sense of separation as awareness meets itself fully and is shocked out of form.

Stopping can reveal vast, borderless spaciousness with no bottom. This is a moment of withdrawing from the trance called my reality and reveals a taste of true reality. Each plunge into the unknown can reveal a different taste of formless intelligence.

Try it now. You have just spent time examining the trance of money, of time, of the name you answer to. All of that is the story of “me.” So ask yourself, simply and directly: Who is aware of all this? Not what you think, not what you feel — but who is the one noticing the thoughts and feelings arising?

Don’t answer with a word or a concept. Be yourself.

That alive intelligence examining itself — even for a moment — is the gap in the trance, a rent in the net — the Gateway of Liberation (The Revolution of Love).

This is the beginning of living and the start of the end of sleepwalking.

Coda: Nina Simone was tormented by the racist society she lived in. She knew both the weight of the trance and the taste of freedom more viscerally than most of us ever will. Her joy and pain inform these two songs: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free and Feeling Good.

We will continue unveiling and unraveling the trance that keeps us sleepwalking — dreaming we are awake and in control — and exploring the ways of waking up in the midst of the dream in Part 2.

Eli Jaxon-Bear is the author of seven books that have been translated into ten languages, including Wake Up and Roar: Satsang with Papaji and The Enneagram of Liberation: From Fixation to Freedom. He is the founder of the Leela School of Awakening, which has branches in Ashland, Oregon; Europe and Australia.

www.leelaschool.org

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