We have been talking about the movie The Matrix over the last several newsletters.

If you could only say one thing about The Matrix, about what it teaches, what it is really about — it would be there have always been two completely different worlds in our lives. We have been lost in one world since our lives began. Can we wake up to the other world, the real world, the better world?

And the ultimate question for us? Which world, at any given moment, will we choose to live in?

In that story, the great majority of humanity has no awareness whatsoever that the real world was laid waste and only several thousand human beings who escaped the AI’s wrath are still alive, hiding in an underworld city called Zion.

For the great majority of humanity were not born by natural means, but artificially conceived by the AI, lying asleep in small little chambers, while the biochemical energy their bodies create is extracted from them . . . to power the AI world. As they lay there, they dream that they each have moment to moment lives in the world before it was ever destroyed, but it is all just a virtual reality creation.

Our hero Neo wakes up from “his life” in that virtual reality world, the only reality he has ever known, only to realize it has always been a dream. He wakes up to learn the real story, that AI destroyed most of humanity and is trying to destroy the little that remains. And then he learns that he may be the savior of the world, the only one who can finally learn how to beat back this virtual reality world, and teach others to do the same, finally being free.

Quite an extreme scenario, with the great majority of humanity completely asleep, right? But if you know the Lord, did you not feel like you woke up from a sleep when your life with God first began? Or at least like you woke up slowly over a period of time? But then, just as significantly, as the Spirit began to show you who you really were, who you had always been, you were just too selfish and narcissistic to admit it . . . did you not feel like you were waking up all over again?

And The Matrix does not only tell the story of two worlds, but two selves, for they are very closely aligned. There is the self all of us are most familiar with, what Thomas Merton called the false self. It is the self every human has been born with since the Fall of man. The false self tends not to think of God, but is overwhelming in love with this world and itself, believing that happiness, fulfillment, peace of mind . . . whatever you want to call that – can only come from achieving it in some shape or form in this world. By possessing things, achieving things, be becoming someone . . . essentially, obtaining the praise of men. The false self lives by a particular value system, a worldly value system. To get a sense of it, all you need to do is to watch ten TV commercials or so, or some reality TV. Hopefully it will make you a little nauseated.

But then there is the other self, what Thomas Merton called the true self. It is our greater essence, thank God; because this is who Adam and Eve were created to be before the Fall, who they were in the Garden with God. They knew God fully, and they knew their greatest and best purpose were to be His children, nothing more, and that life would only work as it was meant to, if they followed the Father. God created them because of Love, His very nature, and their greatest purpose was to be loved by Him, and to love Him and others back. That’s it. The rest of life was meant to be subordinate to this.

Our true self is imprinted on our very souls and it can ever be completely destroyed. But our false self has come to have such free reign, the waters of our hearts are very muddied. The reason we are all so confused as human beings is because we have two selves, and we experience a mixture of them the majority of the time. Part of you wants to selfishly grab whatever that might be in the moment; but the other part of you is trying to speak to you, to tell you you really don’t need that thing as badly as you believe, you just think you do; plus, you’re going to regret it later because it’s really wrong. One day, the false self wins. Another day, the true self wins. Whose on first?

Next time let’s talk about Neo, about how he learns to disregard the Matrix, the false reality, and to be faithful to his true self. And he is similar to the real One who came to save the world.
Sam