The Last Red Pill: Becoming Truly Unfuckwithable

Erik Wikström – STOP.

Right now, before reading another word, look at your hands.

Actually do it. Look at them.

Now ask yourself: What is aware of these hands?

This simple question – this moment of pause – contains within it the key to a freedom so fundamental that no system of control can ever touch it. A freedom that exists prior to all other freedoms.

I’ve spent most of my adult life investigating this question. While I’ve written about power structures, manipulation of perception, and the architecture of control that shapes our world, all of that exploration stemmed from this more fundamental inquiry:

Who am I? What am I?

Is there a part of human experience that remains untouchable by external forces?

The answer I’ve discovered isn’t complicated, doesn’t require belief in any doctrine, and can be verified directly by anyone willing to look. Yet its implications are so profound that once recognized, it changes everything while changing nothing at all.

Let me be clear – this isn’t about escaping reality or transcending the challenges we face. It’s about recognizing something that’s been hiding in plain sight your entire life. Something so obvious, so immediate, that we almost never notice it.

What I’m about to share might initially sound abstract or philosophical. It’s not. It’s the most practical insight possible in a world increasingly designed to capture and control your attention. Because it addresses the fundamental question:

What is that attention, and can it ever truly be captured?

Most of what passes for “freedom” in our world is conditional, easily restricted, and ultimately illusory. But there exists a freedom so basic to your nature that recognizing it can transform your entire relationship with the systems designed to influence and control you.

This isn’t mystical or supernatural. It requires no special knowledge, no initiation, no altered states. It only requires you to look directly at the most obvious fact of your existence – a fact so obvious that we’ve been trained to overlook it.

Are you ready to see it?

Part 1: The Fundamental Recognition

Imagine a virtual reality headset so advanced it perfectly simulates all five senses. When you put it on, you’re immersed in a world indistinguishable from what you call “reality.”

Now imagine you’ve put on this headset, but it hasn’t been turned on yet. There’s no game running, no simulation active, no input at all. Even your memories and sense of self have been temporarily suspended – you’ve become a blank slate hovering in the middle of endless darkness.

What’s there?

You’re still there, aren’t you? Even with no input coming in – no sights, no sounds, no sensations, no thoughts or emotions as you know them – YOU are still present. This pure presence wouldn’t be filled with thoughts or expectations. It would simply be aware, existing.

This wouldn’t feel like “nothing.” It would feel like YOU – pure awareness, pure existence. The I AM presence in its primordial state – full of life but not yet focused on any particular form of life. No thoughts about what that life is or could be, just the raw fact of existence itself.

This is what you fundamentally are.

Not the character in the game. Not the thoughts that arise in consciousness. Not the emotions that flow through your experience. You are the aware presence in which all these appear. The knowing space that precedes every pixel of reality.

Think back to your earliest clear memory. Maybe you were four or five years old. Picture it vividly – where you were, what was happening around you.

The details of that moment – the people, places, sounds – have likely grown hazy over time. But what about the knowing presence that experienced that moment? Is it fundamentally different from the knowing presence that’s reading these words right now?

While everything else about you has changed – your body, thoughts, beliefs, circumstances – your basic “I am” presence has stayed exactly the same. It’s the same when you’re happy or sad, awake or dreaming, healthy or sick, young or old.

When you look into this seriously, something incredible emerges:

Everything about you and the outside world is in constant movement and change. But through all these changes, there’s something that hasn’t changed, and will never change – your awareness of existing. The simple knowing that you are.

When the game starts, the first distinction appears – the first “pixel” of information on the previous seemingly empty screen. This creates the fundamental binary: something/nothing, here/there, 1/0. From this first distinction, all other distinctions are born.

Think of the Big Bang as precisely this moment – the setting of initial conditions and hitting “run” on the cosmic program. The entire universe emerges as patterns of information – intricate configurations of 1s and 0s – appearing within your fundamental awareness.

The laws of physics? The programming of the game.

Your body? Your character’s avatar.

Your thoughts and emotions? The game’s scripting and emotional design.

But you what you truly are – remain untouched by all of this.
You are the knowing in which the entire game appears.

Close your eyes for a moment and ask yourself: “Am I aware right now?”

Notice what comes before any thoughts or words. Something in you immediately knows “yes” before any thinking happens. That immediate knowing of your own existence – that “I am” presence – is what I’m pointing to.

Now, explore this for yourself:

Does your awareness of being have edges or boundaries? Can you find where your “I am” presence begins or ends?

Does this awareness, this knowing, have a color or shape?

Could you escape it somehow? Could you run away from it, or hide from it?

When you’ve been hurt in the past, emotionally or physically, was this basic “I am” presence itself ever damaged?

Does your awareness of being itself ever become anxious or depressed, or does it simply witness those experiences?

Can it feel fear?

Is it born? Even more interestingly, can it die?

Don’t intellectualize these questions. Instead, simply notice the immediate knowing that precedes thought. Feel the answers directly, before your mind forms words around them.

Your whole life, you’ve probably identified with things that change – your body, thoughts, emotions, roles, achievements. Each of these appears and disappears in your experience. But the simple knowing that you exist? That “I am” presence? That’s the constant background to your entire life.

Am I crazy here?

♦ Does this sound too simple to be profound?
♦ Have you considered your own existence in this way before?

What if you aren’t mainly your thoughts, emotions, and life story, but the “I am” presence that knows all these things? What if you’ve been identifying with all the changing stuff in your experience instead of the unchanging knowing of your own existence?

This isn’t mystical gibberish. It’s a straightforward observation about how your experience actually works. And it has profound implications for understanding freedom in a world increasingly designed to influence and control what you think, feel, and do.

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Hat tip Betsy!

SF Source Substack Apr 2025