Fine-Tuning Factory Settings

“You take the blue pill – the story ends; you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” says Morpheus in The Matrix. On my recent trip to Toronto, I had a very interesting conversation around factory settings. Factory settings are the configurations that we are born with, including values and systems acquired from the culture and environment around us. I didn’t do very well in my existing constructs; in my factory settings, I suffered, and I was not happy with my existing narratives and stories. I had the drive to change that because I didn’t think I was going to make it mentally. I thought everything was going to cave in on me. So, to save myself from myself, I had to do something about it.

The Blue Pill Dilemma: Truth or Comfort?

The question is whether reality, truth, and knowledge are worth pursuing. The blue pill leaves us in a life of simple belief, blind faith, and unexamined habits, accepting what we’ve been handed and memorized as truth. It provides the comfort of things we believe we’ll receive by participating in the everyday world without much examination. We choose this pill if we think we don’t need truth to live. It allows us to keep our identities and allegiances with family and friends undisturbed. To expand and transcend my current state, I had to strive to become something bigger. I needed a new perspective. Taking the Blue pill means remaining in factory settings and continuing with life, and a percentage of the population chooses this path.

We all have the capacity for expansion beyond these mundane systems that exist. We need to operate on a much larger scale. We have to change ourselves and the existing systems around us, shifting and making room for this expansiveness. It makes me think about a lot of people out there who don’t have access to this perspective of a higher potential existence. It’s up to us to shift existing constructs and lift the veil of illusions. To collectively shift and expand existing constructs, continuing to make room for the high potential of humanity and the environment in which we exist, healthily, to new heights. We exist for individual and collective expansion, understanding ourselves and the universe we live in at this time.

Philosophy of Choices: Knowledge and Belief

The purpose of offering this reference to the story in Genesis is to draw a comparison between the choices given: Knowledge and Belief. There is no intent here to suggest that knowledge is morally incorrect, evil, or sinful. The contrast is presented between an approach to life based on faith, motivated by hope for positive consequences such as everlasting life, versus an approach guided by knowledge. Some may criticize either choice as being in some way incorrect or offering a lesser life. Some may even characterize one choice as morally incorrect. Such criticism is avoided here as not relevant. The choices are presented here as relevant to what Philosophy is about.

-Neelofer Hilal is a passionate freelance writer, avid traveler, podcaster, futurist, dreamer, and social science enthusiast.