The red pill-blue pill concept was introduced by the Wachowski Brothers in their 1991 blockbuster The Matrix. Following a series of surreal misadventures, the main character is confronted with the choice to take a Red Pill and “see how deep the rabbit-hole goes”, or take a Blue Pill and wake up thinking it was all a dream. Of course, he takes the red one, and everything goes crazy from there. The pills, especially the red one, have gained widespread symbolic usage in English. A red pill is something which jars you awake, raises your level of awareness to one where you “see through” things which concerned you before, like a lab monkey granted the mental facility to comprehend the nature of the lab experiment.
Different Levels of Red Pills
Some pills are stronger than others. A rather low level red pill might be the revelation that promotions at your workplace are based largely on nepotism. Making this realization might make you re-evaluate your career strategy. Certainly it removes a blindfold from you, whereas before you thought that hard work would set you up for promotion. But then, this is all trivial if you already know that you’re starring in The Truman Show. The Truman Pill is so strong that after you’ve taken it, you’ve automatically built up an “immunity” to the mere Nepotism Pill. The Truman Pill itself is trivial if you’ve realized that the whole world (both on- and off-set) is a simulation in a computer.
In The Matrix, Neo learns to see through the illusions of the world he was raised in, to the point where he can bend physics and time. And yet, he never seems to realize that it’s all just a movie and that he’s being played by Keanu Reeves. (At least, not in the first two movies– after the flop which was the 2nd film, I don’t think anybody ever watched the 3rd!)
The weaker pills are still helpful, as preparation for the stronger pills. Somebody too deeply asleep, say, slaving really hard for the promotion and not even knowing the boss’s cousin was already chosen, would have trouble swallowing the “Everything’s A Simulation” pill. It’s one thing to push your comfort zone, it’s another thing to blast it with a hydrogen bomb.
Pill Digestion and Emotional Knowledge
It’s one thing to know, at an intellectual level, that unenlightened life is divided into the Six Hells of Tibetan Buddhism. Sure, yeah, you can pass the final exam and get an A in “Comparative Religions”. It’s a whole other thing entirely to attain emotional knowledge of the same thing. When you’re stuck in traffic and the kids are crying and your phone’s buzzing and some guy is trying to cut in front of you, it takes a very practiced familiarity with the Six Hells to recognize them at play in real-time.
Same thing with Simulationism. It’s one thing to take Philosophy 101 and go “Oooh, Ahhh” over the existentialist stuff, it’s a whole other thing to realize the resulting calm and attention when people are shouting at you and clocks are ticking and you’re not even supposed to be here today!
It’s not enough to just take a red pill once. You must meditate on it, taking it over and over, until it’s digested throughout your bloodstream, until it seeps through the blood-brain barrier.
A Blue Pill is a Prescription Prescription
If the ultimate red pill is something like “Life is a game” or “Life is a simulation”, then blue pills are the rules of that game, the constraints of that simulation.
No specific activity is a blue pill. Filling out TPS reports? Maybe Life is really all just a TPS report, and writing TPS reports is an intermediate step toward this enlightening revelation. The blue pill is not the activity itself, but the act of doing it repetitively, letting it establish a pattern. I’d usually classify Urban Exploration as a medium-grade red pill, but if somebody started systematically doing UE on a script, never deviating from a set exploration pattern, then that actually makes it a blue pill. The blue pill is anything which makes a man more like a machine.
Law can be either color. Studying it can open your eyes to the way society works, dispelling illusions about society. Maybe you study it to find loopholes, so that it actually helps you break out of patterns. On the other hand, maybe you study it in order not to get in trouble, in that case it’s a constraint and pulls you deeper under the covers.
How to Find the Red Pill
If Morpheus doesn’t let you know what’s held in each hand first, it’s still easy enough to detect the red pill. It’s the ones which frightens and excites you. Want to wake up and break free of the patterns? Move toward your fear. Do what’s most far outside the experiences you’re most familiar with.
The rabbit-hole goes deep. Come on in, it’s fun in here 
FURTHER READING
Reality Expansion
Very Serious People
Ten Metaphors for Life
Simulationism and Grand Unification