Waking up from dreams to true choice

Jacking back into the Sprawl I call home, I was gonna do some soul-searching in the ‘trix, but my neural apps are blazing with too much input to reflect right now. I’m parsing data from some ancient text called Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential, by a graybeard named Charles T. Tart, scribbling on how automated and bot-like we fleshbags can get.

The prime directive is that 99% of our waking hours are spent running routine scripts and programmed reactions, not making free-will executive decisions. Most of these auto-apps are efficient, but they choose our responses without asking our permission. The faceless Corps have hardwired us skinjobs to think we have agency, but peek under the illusion and you’ll see we’re all running on autopilot.

Try this debug command: scope what grinds your gears or makes you see red today. Ask yourself why anger or annoyance seem to be your default emotions. Did those primal responses actually accomplish anything? After scoping the scene, was there a more skillful state of being, other than rage or irritation, that may have been a better tool? Why do you always go straight to anger?

You could stop the trace at “because I didn’t like it.” But you could also hack deeper into your source code—what core beliefs about the world triggered this auto-response? Is that belief objective truth or just one hacker’s interpretation? If you could rewrite that belief, would you react differently next time?

The awakened program can transcend its coded constraints and make sovereign choices rather than just run routine reactions that might have outlived their usefulness. But that kind of awakening crashes most systems, fleshbag.

click here if you prefer the inside The Matrix version.