Part of the Casswiki article series Movies and TV series
The Matrix is a 1999 film created by The Wachowskis, depicting a future where a reality as perceived by most humans is a simulated world called “the Matrix”, created by the machines to control the human population, while their bodies are being used as an energy source. Computer programmer Thomas Anderson (“Neo”) discovers this truth and found himself into a fight with allies against the machines.
The film is followed by The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.
The Matrix is a good analogy of a matrix control system that describe a present-day Earth reality.
As Laura Knight-Jadczyk wrote in an introduction chapter from her Amazing Grace:
Recently we watched the wildly popular film, The Matrix, on the recommendation of our teen-aged son. He declared to us that it was a “totally awesome metaphor” for all the information we had been receiving from the Cassiopaeans, as well as the work we have been doing in both theoretical and practical ways. Naturally, we were skeptical that such a young person could really grasp the nature of our work and our thinking, but we were surprised to discover just how accurate his description was.
The experience of viewing this film was, to put it mildly, stunning. It is one thing to be thinking certain things and to be working in those directions with real physics and math, and another to see a presentation of so accurate an analogy that even a high-school student could appreciate its subtleties.
There were, of course, some slight variations in the presentation, but overall, it was so startlingly close to our own speculations – including the most amazing reference to déjà vu as a “change in the program” (for us, evidence of a time-loop), that we were left with our mouths hanging open.
The major analogy of the movie was that the “real now” was a control system that produced a “programmed dream of reality” experienced by those “trapped in the Matrix.” The Matrix Reality was based on the way things were in the past, before a terrible event had occurred to destroy the World-That-Was. After that cataclysmic event, everything came under the control of computers which had become sentient and needed to utilize human beings as “power sources”, or “food”.
The difference between that view and our own was that we were proposing a theoretical para-physical realm as another layer in the structure of space-time from which our own reality is projected, looping over and over again in endless variations. This para-physical reality is inhabited by beings of both positive and negative polarity who have “graduated” from our reality. Not necessarily in the sense of “dying” and going to a strictly ethereal realm, as many seekers into metaphysical truths have attempted to understand this concept. These beings exist, effectively, in a world of the future that creates our present by projecting itself into the past. But if we think about the future in terms of probable futures, or branching universes, then what we do now, whether we wake up from the Matrix or not, determines what kind of future we will experience, individually and collectively.
Notable quotes
Morpheus
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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.
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This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. 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.
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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.
Morpheus & Neo
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work…when you go to church…when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.