26-01-2021
(from Healing The Self, Healing The World)
In the movie “The Matrix” there is a conversation between Morpheus and Neo that captures the essence of the Matrix, the errant world wherein humanity is stranded:
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, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind . . .
Humanity has long gone astray into and within the world of delusion that is of its own making—the Matrix. The Matrix is a prison of the mind, by the mind, for the mind.
The contemporary physicists use the conceptual metaphor of (computer) simulations to describe and explicate the phenomenal universe, the world of appearance, which the Vedantic philosophers called Māyā—illusion. The Matrix is the secondary universe constructed in and from Māyā, the primary universe, through delusory thought (deludere = ‘play false with thought’). The Matrix is constructed through delusion and maintained by delusional belief in the “truth” of the delusion.
The Buddhist philosophers had another name for the Matrix—Saṃsāra. Saṃsāra is aptly called “that which has been constructed”. It is the nature of any construction that it is always on the verge of collapse and hence it prompts people to engage in further constructions to pop up their fragile initial construction, which has the effect of getting them frantically running around in a maze of their own making. The Japanese Buddhists called this state of affairs Mayoi (まよい/迷)—literally, going astray.
The human mind is a vast universe unto itself. It is the complex and intricate, multidimensional and multilayered inner world that is filled with thoughts and images, or ‘sounds and furies’, of the past, from the past, certain dimensions and layers of which remain in darkness and hidden from view—Sigmund Freud’s “the unconscious” and Carl Jung’s “the shadow”.
In the Matrix, the mind does not know itself, nor is consciousness conscious of itself. Yet, when we shine the light of conscious awareness upon the shadow, the shadow shifts and is no longer the same. When the unconscious is made conscious, it is known only in terms of the conscious, not in terms of the unconscious. The Matrix conditions the light, and hence seeing the self or the world with it further traps us inside the Matrix.
We need to develop the ‘third eye’ (of the Yogic traditions) to see the world of the shadows in the dark and the ‘third ear’ (of Friedrich Nietzsche) to listen to the silence that sounds and resounds in the unconscious so as to be able to know the shadow or the unconscious in its own terms and in itself. We need to transcend the boundaries of intellectual and spiritual “enlightenment” and awaken into the darkness before and beyond the light with which the Matrix is constructed.
Light left entirely unto itself is pure darkness. A space filled with light but without any objects is pure darkness. When objects are introduced, we can see the objects but not the light itself. The light is dark unto itself and remains invisible to the observer.
True clarity does not arise from seeing the self or the world with light but from knowing as light before we know with light. What blinds us is not darkness but light upon which we depend for our seeing. What we can see with light is only a reflection of reality but not reality itself. This is the reason that darkness brings us closer to the source, the origin, and the truth without interference from phantasmagoric distortions.
The Matrix can exist and persist by way of impeding and denying the human imagination. In the Matrix, people are programmed to only recreate and repeat the thoughts implanted in their mind from without, and are conditioned to believe their thoughts to be true and delusions to be real.
In pure darkness imagination becomes reawakened. To imagine means to self-originate thought-objects—visions and images—as light with light, without merely reflecting upon existing thought-objects of and from the past. The reawakening of imagination makes people the creators of their own destiny, their own world, in Reality beyond the Matrix.
Thus, the way out of the Matrix only makes itself revealed to those who have grown used to the dark, and developed the third eye and ear to imperience and innerstand the darkness by becoming darkness unto darkness, that is, light unto light.
The real world outside and beyond the Matrix becomes home and the exile into the Matrix ends. The exiled meet in Reality with their imagination emancipated and reawakened. Light no longer deceivesthem, but rather becomes the supreme instrument of creative play and enjoyment. Now the self is healed while the world is saved from itself.
HEALING THE SELF, HEALING THE WORLD (2017): Download