Have you watched the movie “The Matrix,” starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and others? Just a quick detail about the movie, it is a science fiction movie where the reality perceived by humans is a simulated reality controlled by sentient machines.
The Matrix is nothing but the mind. You realize that almost all people on Earth live inside the Matrix, including you, because you belong.
You are controlled by the Matrix when you feel that you're not in control of your life, you feel that you have no free will to decide, and when you feel that something entirely outside is controlling your knowledge and experiences.
While the dystopian AI plot in the movie is catchy, our experiences of reality indeed happen in the mind. You never wholly experience the world you think you know.
Even Biology teaches us that the experiences of our physical senses are energies and frequencies that are transformed into biological and chemical reactions.
One of my readers, Marlon, shared what he knows about the Matrix. This can be a representation of our systems that keeps us in the dark side of media, society, and education as slaves to capitalism.
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The Matrix symbolism
There are many symbols you can find in The Matrix movie, and here are some notable names and objects that hold significant meaning.
The Matrix in the dictionary refers to a situation or surrounding substance within which something else originated, developed, and contained.
The Matrix concept is like an illusion or a construct that humans are unaware of the resemblance of the idea of Samsara in Buddhism and Hinduism.
Samsara teaches that the world you live in is real. It is the reflection of your desires. The way you perceive yourself in the Matrix is simply the mental projection of your digital self.
The real sensory world is electrical signals interpreted by the brain.
Neo in Latin means new. It's also an anagram of the word “one.” Thomas Anderson is Neo's given name and represents the “doubting Thomas” in the Bible when he doesn't believe that he is the one.
Anderson's last name means “son of man,” a messianic title.
In Greek history, the oracle served as an intermediary between God and Man. People could ask Oracle questions and get an answer, which usually appears in a riddle format, which wouldn't make sense until later.
She says, “You know what that means in the Matrix?” Its Latin means, “Know thyself.”
These phrases are transcribed upon the Oracle of Apollo and attributed to the Delphic Oracle, Greece, 6th Century B.C.
The Trinity represents the number three, which is the powerful number in different stories and traditions. In Christianity, it’s called the Holy trinity, because it represents the father, the son, and the holy spirit.
In the Matrix, the trinity is represented by Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo to fight the machines.
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Morpheus symbolizes the molder because of the shapes he presents before the sleeper. In classical mythology, he is the god of dreams that ties the sleep or dream theme that runs throughout the Matrix.
Cypher symbolizes the betrayer or the Judas Iscariot. The word refers to a mathematical symbol, which denotes an absence of quantity, a zero mathematically speaking.
Moreover, it's someone with no value or nonentity. It could also be related to Satan (the shortened version of Lucifer).
Cypher has a goatee beard and wears red in the Matrix, which relates to the popular image of Satan.
All the different characters in the Matrix wear sunglasses, a motif for how people shield themselves by putting up a wall. The sunglasses don't allow people to see and reflect the person the characters are facing.
When they remove the sunglasses, people are more susceptible or get a new perspective of things.
The number three is always present in the movie, portrayed in the trinity that the protagonist and antagonist make. It focuses on the characters' mind, body, and soul, which also symbolizes the biblical trinity. Moreover, the movie starts and ends in room 303.
Nebuchadnezzar is a ship that carried Neo and his crew. In the Bible, Nebuchadnezzar was a king of Babylon that attacked and conquered Jerusalem.
They capture Joachim, king of Judah, together with his family, men, and treasurers of Jerusalem.
Nebuchadnezzar has been used symbolically to represent how mighty the ship is in fighting the enemies since Neo, and his crew used it in the fight against matrix armies.
The Matrix religion and philosophy
The Matrix is a science fiction movie released in 1999, written and directed by The Wachowskis. The film depicts a dystopian world, where reality is a computer simulation.
The Matrix is created by machines to control the human population. This movie belongs to the cyberpunk genre but incorporates many literary, cinematographic, literary, religious, and mythological references.
The movie's storytelling qualities have shown a plethora of interpretations, making it easier to decode the mysteries in the movie. Some literary critics suggest a socio-theoretical perspective on the phenomenon of alienation.
The blend of technology and religious themes have set a perspective in the mind of the viewers. The first one is the metaphysical nature that pushes the audience to question the nature of reality.
The second aims to question the relationship between technology and human. The world is not an objective reality but a computer simulation that controls and operates from the moment you're born.
In the movie, Thomas Anderson, a young computer programmer by day and hacker by night, operates under the name of Neo. He learned about reality before getting enrolled in an army of rebels and managed to get out of The Matrix or the world of dreams created by cyber species.
These species form a unified consciousness, a product of modern human technology. At the end of a long war between humans and the cyber species, the latter won from the conflict.
It then starts its domination all over the world. In this post-apocalyptic world, humans are captured in a virtual simulation and are used as batteries to power The Matrix.
Luckily, a group of dissidents manages to get out of this artificial race and now occupies the City Sion, a hidden underground territory. The rebels prophesied the messiah's arrival, who can save and put an end to The Matrix, and who will restore the human kingdom.
Morpheus is the leader of the rebellion who sees Thomas as the one who will end the ruling of the cyber species that will liberate the human race.
The movie's synopsis tells us that we have the dilemma of the human condition. We are trapped on Earth in a prison of flesh, and humans are asleep and ignorant to their divine nature.
Salvation is the knowledge announced on Earth by a Gnostic redeemer, Christ. The Supreme God sends Christ to free humanity from the grip of evilness.
This theology presented above contains a set of parallels to the movie “The Matrix.” The Matrix thus constitutes the fundamental problem and the solution for humans paradoxically, since its existence is the main hindrance to human freedom.
In the movie, notice the language that Morpheus uses when he addresses the nature of the Matrix to Neo. He repeated the use of the metaphorical language used in Buddhism, such as ignorance, blindness, dream, sleep, forgetfulness, darkness, and many more, representing humankind's problem.
Conversely, we find themes, such as the awakening or tearing of the veil, to express the supremacy of the human condition, which represents freedom.
Neo's role or mission is to free humans from their world more than from the grip of evil. However, the divinity is not apparent – it's invisible and discreet.
This approach connects with Orthodox Christianity, which means that if the divine is not visible, the awakening of the human builds itself. In Buddhism, it teaches us that the world we experience is a product of the spirit and is an alteration of reality.