The Matrix, Society and the Religions that Imprison us All

by Christopher Barr

Morpheus: What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

The Matrix is a visually stunning film about a computer programmer for a large generic software company by day and a computer hacker by night, who is recruited into a group of freedom fighters led by a man named Morpheus.  This computer hacker, who goes by the alias Neo, is told by Morpheus that he is living in a dream world that is controlled by artificially intelligent machines.  Neo naturally resists this absurd tale until it is proven to him. 

Upon waking up on the other side, in the real world, Neo is told further detail as to what the machines want with humans and what happened to civilization in the first place.  Clearly the machines of our creation outsmarted us and in turn, enslaved us to generate enough power to maintain their complex circuitry.

Neo learns that his home wasn’t real and more tragically on a personal level, he wasn’t real, at least the life he led.  Understandably he required time to adjust to the reality of his situation.  Prior to this revelation, Neo just did his own thing, under his own radar and that was his problem, which is why his life wasn’t fulfilling.  Neo was unaware of his servitude to a controlling system and that’s how this film parallels so profoundly with our world and the illusion we all live daily.

The Matrix was a program designed by machines to provide mental stimulus for human bodies connected to these machines as a source of power.  In the film the Matrix, Neo exists in the sixth version of the program, prior to that, there have been multiple versions with flaws in the program much like, but far more complex then, Microsoft’s Windows operating system versions.

Like the machines in The Matrix, our reality is filled with control, transnational corporations and the global banking cartel have bought and paid for their own puppet government, to help push their agenda for global dominance and monetary superiority.  This world that we all share is in a state of irreversible decline because of the greed and power that these corporations hold over this planet.  I would love to say that if we all just pitched in, we might be able to actually reverse this impending calamity, but I’d be lying.  I wish I wasn’t, I wish we could get it all back or start at zero and do it right this time but all the evidence, in every field of hard science and study, point to the extinction of our species.

What do you do with this information?  Especially on that scale, what do we do?  There are groups and grass roots organizations out in the world fighting; they are fighting to take back our planet from those that stole it from us all.  The problem is there are too few fighting and too many switching the channel to the fiction of reality TV or to the fantasy of religion.  There are too many that haven’t the mental faculty to sustain thought long enough, in order to decipher the complex ‘Matrix’ that’s been pulled over their eyes.

We live in a society of fear, a society where hurting someone’s feelings holds more weight than asking why something is the way it is.  We live in a society of pacified consumers that believe that God is looking over them and Jesus is set to return during the rapture.  This line of conformity thought will be the death of us all.  This may seem extreme but again, the evidence is piled high in support of this unfortunate trend.

Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

 

Societies function in a number of ways, but arguably one of the most important ways, is the controlling of the populace.  People out of control can cause a society to crumble, so in order to prevent this capitalistic disaster in modern society, governments and corporations must use various levels of mind control and propaganda.

There are a number of potential disarmaments those that rule over society keep in proper check.  Peace can never come to pass, people can never fully get along and the population must be kept sick and ignorant.

Peace is kryptonite for the profitability that fuels the massive military industrial complex.  The world is a business so business must be everlasting.   That’s why people can’t be allowed to ever get along.  In order to continue governmental war programs, there must always be a threat to safety.  People must be kept in a state of fear of loneliness because the fear helps them go along with, dependency, otherwise insane acts of war.  

People that are intellectually and spiritually one with themselves don’t need things to help define their lives.  The person that is awake to the realities of the world, enhances their lives with other people and nature, not with how much designer clothing they own or what brand of cell phone they carry.  So it’s important to governments, corporations and their shareholders that the population is kept fearful and insecure about themselves.  That’s how you sell them things like wars and in the same breath, a juicy genetically modified big mac at McDonalds.

Which comes to, keeping a population sick and ignorant; sick people, physically and mentally have their strength, energy and will sucked out of them.  Smart, educated, healthy groups of people can see the deceit and lies the government passes as laws and freedom.  This world functions as a money and power gathering system for less than one percent of the population.  To continue this form of power over the majority of the people, the use of religious dogma and a law system allows the ruling class to control the world.

It’s a very sick and twisted reality that in most cases doesn’t make any sense because of the obvious question.  Why?  Why do so many people have to suffer and be kept from living a fulfilling life with the benefit of equal opportunity, equal rights and an education to help them on their life’s journey?

It’s quite possible the answer lies in the ego and the narcissism psychologically bound to the human psyche.  This is why it’s important to understand that those truly in power, and I don’t mean the most powerful man in the world, the president of the United States, who’s clearly a powerful avatar or more likely a puppet for the real power, the true elite of the world aren’t sick people.  No more then you and I are sick in the Freudian sense, they just so happened to have been born a Rothschild or a Rockefeller.  They would struggle with similar conflicts toward the internal convoluted workings of the society of the mind.  They have good relationships with people and bad, they have kids and marital problems.

 “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” -  Einstein

English writer and public speaker, David Icke in his lectures says the elite are from secret societies that worship crazy animals and plan world wars.  Although I don’t think this is entirely false I do think turning these people into mythological shadows isn’t a compelling psychological way to understand them.  Neither is suggesting they come from a long blood line of lizard people that cover their skin to appear to look like ordinary people.  This even furthers us away from understanding people with immense power, by turning them into a crazy conspiracy theory, right up there with alien abduction.  The one thing we should take from David Icke is never assuming all that we know is all that there is.

 “Our civilization is founded on the suppression of our instincts.” - Freud

Human beings, no matter what race or intellectual background they come from, are subject to reality perception and not reality itself.  That perception comes with a belief system attached to it, where we believe things about the world.   When we are affected by the physical world our sensory data correlates and deciphers that information in our brains and forms a version of understanding, our own version of what the information means to us and the space outside of us.  So this begs the question, after all this processing is complete, how much of what is real is left?  How do we know what is real if this form of filtering and self-propagandizing lies within us all?

Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Do we live in a Matrix-type world?  Do we live in a holographic world where illustrations of reality bang off the edge of the universe and reflect back to a time we call present?  What are the dangers of expanding consciousness?  What is outside of subjective human consciousness, and are we just witnesses to the real world or bad interpreters or observers of it, but lack the right to actually participate in it?  These questions are all in The Matrix, and the film leaves many of them open-ended.  They opened the door and hoped the audience would walk through it.

We do live in a Matrix of sorts, we, like the machines, create the world we live in by using the tools we are programmed to use.  They use programming and we use our imagination as our filler.  The properties that create thought appear to have no bias with what’s real and what isn’t.  Its primary concern is self-preservation so if what we believe protects us in some way, then that’s all that biologically matters.

Are we not a species of complicaters, do we not take our understanding of language and imagination to an extreme when we invent reality?  Are we not all inventors and does consciousness fuel this invention?   Consciousness is a memory/experience recalling system with the primary purpose of recalling the past to navigate through the present as part of the bio-systems self-preservation drive.  

“Here we experience the consequence of a doctrine which has been preached from all of the housetops: that the State is the highest goal of humanity and that there are no higher duties for a man than to serve the State. I see in this a regression not to paganism but to stupidity. It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in the service of the State actually knows no higher duties; but there are beyond this, other men and other duties - and one of these duties, which for me, at any rate, is more important than service to the State, calls on one to destroy stupidity in every form, including this particular stupidity.”   -Frederich Nietzsche

What is normal is only normal now, that seems obvious but we all come from a history where the world was flat and sea-monsters controlled the vast oceans.  We lived in a time where God created the world as we know it and ghosts tormented the living during the shadowy dark of night.  But the truth is people made it all up.  This story is ancient and comes from a time when fundamentally we didn’t have all the answers but we had this working brain and imagination.  We didn’t know why we were on this planet or that we were even on a planet for that matter.  We didn’t understand why some people lived for a certain amount of time and then died.  We didn’t understand how some of us contracted diseases and others didn’t, why some of us died at an early age and others flourished.  We didn’t understand what caused weather, why it snowed in some places and not in others, why thunder and lightning crashed down from the cloudy sky, and why tornadoes or hurricanes occurred.

We’ve been living in civilization for the last five thousand years which is roughly 0.2% of our evolutionary history.  That leaves 99.8% when we were hunter and gathers in the wild of nature.  That’s the reality because it’s only been recently in our history that we’ve institutionalized religion as the source of creation.

Culture defines our reality now and it also teaches us but equally divides us.  This is the result of human beings asking a question that makes us uniquely different to other complex organisms on this planet, the question is ‘why?’.  We seek out reasons for why things are, we are constantly probing paranormal phenomena to explain the observable.  It is because of this ability that we’ve been able to advance the species from hunting and gathering, to exploring the nature and vastness of the universe, but it’s also why we are easily led to believe in absolutely absurd notions of reality, and the origins of our species that was so-called precipitated by a grand architect.

We, as a species, are ‘why’ obsessed and that is our gift but it is also our curse.  It’s our gift for those who explore advancements in medicine and for those who dive deeply into the philosophical questions of the nature of reality and the human experience.  That’s what I’d call the ‘progressive why’ and then there is the ‘conservative why’, this why is still screaming and yearning for answers to our collective ‘why’ obsession but it doesn’t have the proper cognitive mapping construct, to use when seeking answers to their questions. This ‘conservative why’ is the true virus on this planet and its eminent destruction.

So what did we do?  Early man formed descriptions of our little place in the world and with our limitations and lacking points of reference; we tried to figure it out, to feel secure in it and to keep our people safe.  We started to talk about it, we tried to understand it, we started to tell each other stories about the world and pass those stories onto our young, in order to protect them from the varying elements that existed in it.  Our stories of the world became the history that we made up and this is where our problem lies today.  We forgot or more likely have been misled about how our factual history originates from storytellers and not from bibles.  This is the true birth of human beings on this planet.  We all still drink the Kool-Aid and take comfort in our old stories of Gods and monsters.

"We have a choice.  We have two options as human beings.  We have a choice between conversation and war.  That's it.  Conversation and violence.  And faith is a conversation stopper."  -Sam Harris

Religion destroys spirituality; I just recently viewed a very disturbing video that took place in the fall 2013.  I will not post it on this site due to its graphic nature, but I sat through it myself in order to be reminded of the extent ignorant people are willing to go to unknowingly protect their ignorance.  The title of the video was called, “Suspected Witches Burned Alive by Christians in Kenya.”  This video took place in a wooded area where about 100 Kenyans gathered around a trench while five or six others, whipped and beat five suspected witches.  They throw brush on them and kept beating them into the trench.  They set the brushes on fire and kept beating these heretics until they couldn’t fight back anymore, falling over into the fire brush and burning to death.

This is morally and rationally inexcusable, but the bible told them to kill heretics, stone them and burn witches.  “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.  Whoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.  He that sacrificeth unto any god, save to the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed.” Exodus 22:18-20.  For all the ‘faith’ that can be found in religion, there appears to be a hundred times that in fear/hate.  These people on the surface are scared of evil and demons in the world.  There is a true belief that witches are real just as Romanian’s in rural areas still fear vampires.  The problem with religion is; if it were all true, and we are in the service of God, then we must follow his commands, we must kill all non-believers that threaten our peace on this planet.  But the truth is, it isn’t real, it’s made up by governing rulers in totalitarian civilizations, which only wish to control their populations.  This is the true face of religion, believe in our lie without any threats or you die.

The problem with belief is its complex.  Often people believe but have no reason as to why they believe, stating that it’s just a feeling they have.  Some people are Christians but later confess they don’t think Jesus walked the earth and that he’s the son of God.  Or Muslims that don’t read the Koran but follow its scripture, they believe but they don’t know why.  There are of course religious people out there that do believe and feel they know why they believe.  Maybe the problem isn’t really religion but how we organize our thoughts in our mind; how we just think something is real and follow that thought without the benefit of deductive reasoning, to somehow validate the thought before we send it out in the world.

The coordinates to connect the dots are founded in knowledge, not merely information.  Asking the question of ‘what’s this all about’ will never do.  We must as individuals and a species get past this way of thinking that things will be figured out for us.

Neo’s journey in the Matrix was a personal one but it was also for the future of mankind.  It was about the fight to wake up and see the world for what it truly is, an illusion.  It was about seeing the controlling forces that keep the world in its level of enslavement.  This story was like the Buddha’s journey so many years ago in Northern India and also a retelling of the allegorical plight of the prisoner in Plato’s cave. 

Neo, was helped by Morpheus because the illusion of the Matrix was too real to question.  Therein lies the problem in our reality, people think it’s all too real.  The true sign of intelligence is an individual who is constantly wondering about the world.  For the rest of the people, they seem to all think they are doing everything right in their lives.  Without the help of metaphors for hope like Morpheus, most of us won’t get the chance to even chose between the red pill or the blue pill.