This post is about how to eat well in *The Matrix* (otherwise known as 'popular mass-consensus reality'). 

*The Matrix* does not want you to eat in a way that provides clean fuel to all your working parts. The low-consciousness authority structures (governmental-corporate complexes) that oversee *The Matrix* would prefer that you eat junk. This is because when you eat junk it is harder to perform the mental functioning required to perceive that you are in a corporate reality-tunnel. A reality tunnel that is run and maintained, internationally, by wounded leaders acting out their traumatic childhoods.

In the interests of unplugging myself from *The Matrix* I have, after considerable psychedelic psychotherapy, arrived at a point where I have quit psychedelic exploration and am now returning to my body. In doing so, I have begun to appraise the global fuel-supply chain that provides our bodies with energy and nutrients. In short, I've been eyeballing food and thinking: What the fuck is this?

A month ago, I decided to stop eating anything produced by the meat and dairy industry. For me, this was a big step, because for decades I have eaten meat. Quite a lot of meat. But now, this is a typical meal for me. All vegetables and grains and stuff. I made this an hour ago; it was delicious:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/531/31851977240_3aa405cfa5_b.jpg

I used to love jamming burgers down my pipe. The delicious meleé of hate and death was the perfect accompaniment to my time lived as a slave to a job I hated; trapped in a life that wasn't mine.

 I was so angry (like so many kids) about being abused in childhood and so, as Freud observed, I had a subsconsious compulsion to repeat this trauma as an adult: I did so on the animals of the world.

I rationalised it much as the British Colonialists did their concentration camps:  Well, everyone seems to be saying this is ok, so it must be ok.

If you are eating meat still. I don't blame you. I did too. I probably still would be if I hadn't eaten a lifetime's supply of LSD and de-programmed myself at a root level. Now I even buy all my food without packaging from a special grocery store and keep it all in recycled jam jars. This is one of my cupboards:

https://c5.staticflickr.com/1/519/32189456396_a69e6c7096_b.jpg

Food was once inexorably attached to my childhood conditioning: As kids, we were loaded up on cheese-on-toast and milk. This ritual would take place at something called a 'dinner table' which, in reality, was a terrorist organisation run by two wounded adults. 

The adult called 'mother' would use food as a punishment. If she decided we had offended her in some way, food would be withdrawn and we would go hungry. Other times, the reverse would occur: I remember, for example, her force-feeding my sister a soup until she threw up. 

Another time, the adult called 'mother' jammed a bar of soap in my sister's mouth because she had sworn. Apparently it was unacceptable to make certain sounds with your mouth if those sounds combined syllablically to make a word that was deemed by *The Matrix* to be 'rude'.

To teach us not to be rude, my mother would violently assault us. Some readers may notice an odd paradox here.

The 'mother' seemed to think that her food was an extension of her and if we did not like her food, then we did not like her. In fact, I did not like her, but it had nothing to do with food, it was because she relentlessly beat me (sometimes unconscious) and allowed my father to do the same (and sexually abuse me). But, here, I want to focus on the food aspect of human child-rearing patterns.

Because my mother thought that the food she made was her, and she was depressed and angry, we were faced with an inescapable problem: The food was often not enjoyable to eat because she was not fully present during its preparation; and simultaneously she would closely inspect our every gesture as we ate it.

Any sign of dissatisfaction or 'being full' before she had decided we were full would be met with assault. As a result, I have for decades struggled to identify when I am full or not; or even if I need to eat or am enjoying my food. I am only just beginning to understand and enjoy food. This, for example, is what I bought today:

https://c4.staticflickr.com/1/537/32227698715_60501eb327_b.jpg

As little as a year ago, this would have been impossible for me. 

You deeply damage a child if you condition them to ignore their body, and then force feed, or withdraw food at random –– while, of course, rationalising this by claiming the child is a 'difficult eater'. It has taken a lot of work to undo that damage. Much of it pre-verbally conditioned.

This sort of aggression connected to food, of course, has historical precedent in Britain (the country where I grew up). The British used food to manipulate the Irish. Like, for example, when the British government sent Charles Trevelyan to oversee relief work during the Irish potato famine and he "refused to hand out food to the starving Irish. Instead, he instituted a public works program that forced dying people into hard labor building pointless roads so they could afford to buy grain". <sup>1</sup> My mother's family was Irish, so perhaps this was Freud's classic compulsion-to-repeat in action again.

But now things are changing for me. I even have fresh basil:

https://c5.staticflickr.com/1/369/31851987780_c2761020a2_b.jpg

Now that I meditate two hours a day, I've begun to understand more about why I ate meat to begin with. Beef (my main fancy) was often so far abstracted from the reality of what it was that I never struggled much to eat it. Although I was a late-comer to steak since its sinewy proclivities betrayed the animal behind the curtain.

But, had all my meat products come with heads attached then I probably would never have eaten meat in the first place. I was inherently adverse to eating anything that obviously was an animal, rather than a lumpen abstraction of what I was told was once an animal. 

During meditation this week, I discovered what I think many people would be reluctant to admit (I know I was): I ate meat because I was angry. And I used to express that anger by, among other things, co-sponsoring huge internment camps in which animals were held in prison cells and then slaughtered. 

I have to be honest with myself now. I knew what went on in those places; I saw the photos. But, hey, everyone was doing it.

It can't be wrong if everyone's doing it?

Everyone still has a slave and that's just fine too.  It's legal in all thirteen British Colonies. Oh, hang on, I'm confusing myself. I thought I was living in 1776.

Anyway, back to killing animals: that's different. That's definitely fine.

The problem I had with killing animals though, on a personal level, is that I was doing it partially to assuage the anger of living blindly in *The Matrix*. And, now I've left *The Matrix*, I feel a lot happier and more free just eating this instead, which was lunch:

https://c4.staticflickr.com/1/284/32108949971_ec010234b0_b.jpg
https://c3.staticflickr.com/1/508/32078848202_e70036eee6_b.jpg


**Footnotes**
<sup>1</sup>http://listverse.com/2014/02/04/10-evil-crimes-of-the-british-empire/