"You take the blue pill... the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." 

The Matrix dilemma; the big decision. The metaphor that launched a thousand ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ conversations. 

In case you missed 1999, the Matrix was a Keanu Reeves blockbuster. The one in which the red pill represents embracing a brave uncertain future; exiting from the enslaving control of a machine-generated dream world into living the "truth of reality”. All very Jean Paul Sartre. 

The blue pill represents a beautiful, but delusional prison, albeit one of ignorance-but-comfort within the simulated reality of the Matrix. 

There you go. Who needs 1999 anyway?

But, you know, I’ve always wondered what might have happened if he’d eschewed the binary and chewed them both. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that!)

And as a coach seeking to co-design with my client a context in which she or he can access what we at Harthill call their Alchemical way of seeing the world, that’s a conundrum I’m facing daily. 

What do I mean by the Alchemical way of seeing the world? Well, it’s one that can live in illusion and reality at the same time – understand the difference and value both. The one that can see simplicity and complexity as being present at the same time, be simultaneously joyful and sad, serious and funny, confident and afraid – swallowing the blue and the red pill together, finding ourselves being both enlightened and perplexed by what comes next and flourishing in the finding out. 

It's like conducting explorations into Quantum Superposition and Entanglement. Schrödinger loved it and illustrated it with the whole dead-and-alive-cat concept. Einstein despite helping to pioneer the notion, found the surrender of scientific certainty impossible to rationalise and turned his back. 

Quantum Superposition: According to the Scientific American ‘any chunk of matter can occupy two places at once’. The alive place and the dead place like the infamous cat; reality and illusion like my red/blue pill thought experiment. Or maybe emboldened and afraid like many of my coaching clients when considering the current world in which they live their lives. 

Quantum Entanglement: physics.stackexchange.com tells us that this can be the exchange of information from a particle that is known to be in several situations simultaneously. 

The Alchemical invitation is to entangle with ourselves in both reality and the illusion, the joy and the sadness, the emboldenment and the fear. To send ourselves postcards from both edges of our self-experience and to read them again and again. And as coaches our role is to support our clients in the ride.
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