Thoughts On Matrix Revolutions
Joseph Campbell said that it was impossible for us to talk about--or conceive--God. The Reality that created the universe is beyond our reach. We have attempted through culture and language to describe God. But whether we are speaking of a tribal God, or one more universal, Campbell said that God, ultimately, is beyond our ability to talk about, or think about, 'him.' In the end, we are a small part of reality and the great Reality does not appear on the radar screen of our five or six senses.
And so it is with the third installment of The Matrix, 'Revolutions.' Here we finally understand that the Wachowski brothers are saying that any true expression of Reality is beyond us. We are, all of us, caught within a system, only a part of which is 'the matrix.' At every level of the program the participants believe they are experiencing reality. Ask someone on the street in the matrix if she is real and she will reply, with a puzzled look, 'Of course.' In the same way the 'people' of Zion believe they are in a real place. Agent Smith thinks that he, instead, inhabits reality. The machines look out on the fields of human pods and see reality. Neo and Trinity and Morpheus would say that the matrix is only a program, but that they are real.
In fact, the Wachowskis have created a world where nothing is real. Everything we see is programmed. It's all silicon. And just as the light from the projector shines through celluloid to present images, the light and shadows on the movie screen and the story screened have this in common: both are portrayals of the Real, instead of Reality itself. In the end, Morpheus looks up to see the machine sentinels departing and asks 'Is this real?' And we must answer, 'No, Morpheus, none of it is real, including you.'
The revolutions that we witness are not in the sense of a revolt, but of a wheel revolving. It keeps spinning. It is going round and round. And it never stops. We cannot get on, we cannot...
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