The Matrix and the nature of reality
The movie “The Matrix” occupies a cult status among its fans. It was dubbed the best movie ever made, and I totally agree with that statement. I was captivated and hooked after I saw it for the first time because it planted in me the seed of an idea that was hard to brush off. The idea was that the reality humans experience is merely a simulation. This idea is so counter-intuitive that it should have been easy to dismiss as pure fiction. Nonetheless, it had such a romantic and utopian allure because it questioned the nature of our reality.
In the movie, humans are living in a simulated reality controlled by machines. They are incubated in containers that keep them in a state of deep sleep. Unaware of their conditions, humans believe that they are living, working, socializing, and making families. This belief is simply due to the projections of a simulation program running in their heads. This is a very intriguing plot, and it is no surprise that such a plot appeals to science fiction fans. What is surprising though is that some prominent scientists call the Matrix a documentary, not a fiction.
The mystery of the Matrix’s appeal among scientists and the public alike can be understood if we know that it has popularized an ancient idea that has been around for millennia.
However, this idea has been kept a protected secret available only to top elites and members of secret societies. But in one sweep the movie brought it into pop culture in a dramatization that captivated everyone’s imagination. This idea states that your mind, which you use every day and in every decision making, is neither yours nor under your control.
On the face of it, this sounds preposterous and absurd. However, we should not let its absurdity becomes a barrier between us and examining its premise. The movie was so well received and liked exactly because this idea stirred something in us. It prompted us to question the validity of our taken-for-granted-perception and kindled a quest for truth. And there is nothing more intriguing than a tantalizing puzzle that carries an implicit promise to overturn reality. I was one of those intrigued by that promise and I decided to follow my heart-driven quest as far as it leads me.
My quest led me to find out that the idea of the Matrix is almost identical to a Mesoamerican myth. The shamans of Mesoamerica believe that our minds are cosmic parasites inoculated inside us by energetic beings. Their sole purpose is to harvest our emotional energy for food. The similarities between this myth and the movie are uncanny. The only obvious difference is that the energetic beings were replaced by the machines in the movie. This was most probably done to give the movie a theme relevant to our modern times. But the core elements remained the same. What I also found is that this story is not exclusive to the shamanic folklore.
All monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) carry a similar narrative. It is the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. In this version of the story, the symbols took different imageries. Obviously, Adam and Eve represented mankind. The controlling agent was another ethereal being, Satan that was symbolized by the serpent. The mind was aptly symbolized by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge pictured as an apple. Eating the fruit of that tree meant gaining this “forbidden” knowledge, a metaphor for acquiring an alien mind. This story did not end in us being food; however, our fate was not much better than in the shamanic story. We ended up losing the state of grace and banished out of paradise. We also became influenced, or maybe even controlled, by this being. According to some versions of this story, Satan moves through us like blood moves through veins.
Further afield from religion and folklore, I found out that ancient philosophers alluded to the human condition in similar terms. Plato in his book “Republic” presented the allegory of the cave.
In it, humans were prisoners chained all their lives to a wall of a cave watching shadows projected in front of them. The flickering shadows are coming from objects passing in front of a fire behind the prisoners. The prisoners, oblivious of the objects and the fire behind them, believe these shadows to be their reality.
It’s interesting to see that the idea of humans hoodwinked to misjudge a projection for reality is ancient and appears in diverse cultures but still not common knowledge today. This can only be explained by the proposition made in the movie that the dominion of that mind is very strong over our society that to go against it you risk incurring a penalty. Regardless of the penalty, it’s obvious that this mind has a detrimental effect on our humanity and wellbeing. However, we should not rely on mythology and philosophy alone to reach such a significant conclusion. We need to find some supporting evidence in the sciences too.
As it turned out, there is ample support for the fact that the human mind can be programmed and manipulated. This is the basis of many industries like advertising, or branches of knowledge like positive psychology. The use of repetition and subtle cues can convince the mind of something that it might not believe in otherwise. And this is not a notion exclusive to psychology; neuroscience has also furnished us with some beautiful examples of how memories can be erased, changed, or inserted.
This knowledge is now mainstream that it would be hard to find an educated person who would question that the mind is very similar to a computer; it can be programmed and reprogrammed. What is not mainstream, however, is the idea that you are not in control of the program running your mind. And it is easy to understand why this is a hard-to-accept fact. We identify strongly with the content of our minds. We believe that we are who our egos tell us we are. We cherish our opinions and passionately defend them against any seeming threat. We might even be willing to die for them. To question the content of our minds seems equal to questioning the existence of who we believe we are.
But in search of truth, I’m not afraid to question my beliefs. I felt that some essential questions had to be asked. If my mind has been programmed, who has programmed it? How much control did I have over the content of my programs? And where is my true mind in all of this? These are questions pertaining to self-knowledge. And this quest has been a journey of self-knowledge and discovery. Going through it got me closer to unlocking the messages of the Matrix. And I am sharing what I have learned with you because I believe it can change our lives.
One of the concepts that took me a really long time to understand was the concept of the “heart”. All enlightened people advised us to follow our hearts, but no one told us what does this exactly mean. Some end up confusing the “heart” with their emotions, which we know from experience can fog our judgment. So, that cannot be it. It was only recently that I understood what the “heart” refers to. It is a different way of perceiving and processing information. Understanding the difference between how the heart works, versus the mind, is crucial to answering the questions I posed earlier.
The heart has a different way of seeing the world than that of the mind. From the heart’s point of view, all children are born with an innate knowledge of their essence. They are born knowing who they are, why they are born at that time and space, and in that particular environment. They know their purpose for coming to that life, the challenges they are going to face, and what they would like to get out of this existence. This knowledge is not similar to what an adult knows as knowledge; it is not language-based, it is not coming from learning and it definitely isn’t located in the head. That’s why the ancients called it the “heart” to distinguish it from the knowledge that is head-based. As adults, the closest thing to this knowledge that we know of is Intuition. However, this knowledge is much more than intuition; it is a direct knowledge of the spirit that inhabits the newly born’s body.
From the moment a child is born, everyone in the child’s environment becomes a teacher. What they teach is their worldview. They basically transmit the programs running in their heads to the newly born.
Little by little as the information accumulates inside the brain of the child, it starts to render the world according to this information. It is building the world bit by bit until the child sees it as everyone else sees it. Similar to computer programs that take a series of zeros and ones to render into graphics, the brain takes complex ideas and translates the energy of the world into a tangible reality. Although no two people see the world exactly the same way, and although there are so many variations in worldviews, the program that is transmitted from one person to another is so homogenous that we end up largely agreeing on its basic contents.
This program running in the world as a whole is what the movie dubbed the “Matrix”. The program running in your head, a.k.a. your mind, is a personalized version of it. Here comes the first and crucial difference between the heart’s and the mind’s points of view. In the mind’s worldview, the world is out there independent from us; the information we know about it comes from our observation of it. The heart sees it reversely; the world is projected outside of us based on the information we believe is true of it. This is exactly the same main message of the Matrix; the world is a set of downloaded programs projected in your mind.
And the mind does not give us only a worldview. Every child is also taught who she is based on her cultural, societal, educational, ideological, geographical, sexual, and racial background. This information overrides what the child is born knowing, thus the heart’s knowledge gets buried under layers of societal conditioning. By the time we learn to think for ourselves, around age 7, we become indoctrinated members of our society. The voice of our hearts, at this point, becomes faint and hard to hear and our lives are run by the programs we have been given. All subsequent learning, opinions, decisions, and thoughts are built on top of the foundation of these programs. That’s why it is said that the mind you are using is not yours; it belongs to your circumstances, to your conditioning. The true self, for the vast majority of people, remains hidden, inaccessible, and alienated.
I don’t think that this mind has been given to us by evil powers, as some of the stories would want us to believe. This is a disempowering and self-defeating proposition. What I truly believe in that the conditioning that we go through is something we chose as a challenge to guide our evolutionary path. Our challenge, if we accept it, is to realize that without unlearning our conditioning we will never know our true selves or our true purpose. Our highest potential lays in this knowledge, hence the advice of the ancient to follow the path of the heart. It is the most rewarding journey you can ever make because every item on it is personalized for you. It will bring your uniqueness and authenticity to the world in a way that no one else can match.
So, what are you waiting for? The world is waiting for you.
Heartfulness in the time of a pandemic
A little bit more than a year ago I left a comfortable and well-paying corporate job in Amsterdam and moved to the south of Spain. My idea was to reflect on life, understand myself, and find my true calling. I gave myself a sabbatical year, hoping that by the end of the year I would have figured out the answers to many of my questions. Although this move carried considerable financial risk, I felt supported by the woman I considered the love of my life. I was taking a leap of faith, for sure, but at least we were leaping together. It turned out, however, that my faith in the relationship was misplaced. It seems that we came together only to catalyze the move, but not to continue the journey hereafter. I found myself suddenly alone in a country where I don’t speak the language, know no one and have no job. A situation that I have never experienced before in my life. I am not going to deny that there was a moment in which I panicked and doubted the sanity of the decision I made. There were two things that I had to do quickly. First, I needed to evaluate whether the purpose for which I moved here was still valid. Second, I needed to create a social network to not feel alone and isolated.
After reflection, I concluded that the purpose was still valid; I moved because I was fed up with living a rational life that does not nourish my heart. That had not changed. So, regardless of the circumstances, I decided to stay committed to my current course. That decision paid back handsomely when I was able to, finally, find the content of my heart and learn to hear and trust its voice. Living with the guidance of your heart is what I call “heartfulness”. It is a way of life that is in contrast to the rational way of living. Instead of feeling like an island isolated from everything and everyone, heartfulness taught me that I am part of a whole. What I call myself, others and the world is a gestalt. My consciousness is only focused on one fragment of that totality that I identify with as myself. Reaching this point of understanding and living by it has changed my life. It has, definitely, helped me cope with the bizarre circumstances we all found ourselves trapped in as the coronavirus spreads from one country to the next.
Spain declared emergency measures to contain the spread of the virus. There is a total lockdown, severe restriction on movement, and a ban on gatherings. This happened just as I began to enjoy a normal and balanced social life again. Almost overnight, I was not the only one panicking over social isolation. Effectively, my solo living started to feel like solitary confinement. However, there was a major difference this time; I was able to see what is going on from my heart’s point of view. What my heart sees is that far worse and wider than the spread of the coronavirus, was the spread of fear. The virus has infected an estimated 330,000 cases worldwide (at the time of writing), while fear has gotten into, at least, 6.5 billion out of the 7.7 billion living today. With fear came paranoia and hysteria that are oscillating to a fever pitch. Almost every news outlet and media channel is feeding this hysteria. Everywhere you look, more fear and gloom are injected into the spinning wheel of your mind. And we all know what this wheel can spin. Left unchecked in a vicious circle, it can easily lead to insanity. This is also what I felt talking to different people; their minds are spinning negative scenarios one after another. Anxiety and paranoia are building up fast, and being confined in the cubic space of one’s home is not helping.
I am lucky because I have the views of my heart supporting me in these strange times. I feel that the fear which has presented itself as such a ferocious monster is here to make us examine the life we are living. Fear is the most disempowering emotion in the universe. It subjects whoever feels it to the force and tyranny of whatever is feared, notwithstanding the real power of the person, object or idea that is feared. The mind can easily create a monster out of an invisible particle and transform a normal day into an apocalypse. Fear is so powerfully negative because it subtracts a lot from the energy available to you and gives it away to what you fear. You are, literally, breathing life into what you fear. Subsequently, that can subjugate you using your own energy. This is the simple arithmetic of disempowerment.
Disempowerment is so common in our lives that we hardly give it any attention. We easily buy into the statements of fear mongers without realizing how this affects our options in life. But the intensity of the fear we are facing this time will push many of us to examine our attitude towards it. Fear is merely an emotion that is, most of the time, generated by an imagined scenario. The billions of people who are afraid are not sick or dying, but they fear to be sick and dying. This is the mind spinning its wheels to control the individual. This will not happen if you are living with awareness and listening to the voice of your heart. My heart, for example, sees that this fear has two levels. Collectively, the fear which is gripping the world is a reflection of the fear humanity has been harboring inside each one of us. It is a byproduct of the rational view of life which sees us as isolated from the totality of it; that we are only here to exploit or being exploited. This is the time to step back from that view which we have been feeding for millennia. It is time to rethink our relationship to each other, to our environment, and also to our institutions. We have always been operating under the banner of “survival of the fittest”, focusing on our needs at the expense of others’. This is the mentality that breeds fear. The same fear, which by the virtue of us feeding it our energy, is now paralyzing the world.
Individually, we all have our unique fears to face. But the most obvious of these fears is the fear of death. The current crisis is giving us a unique opportunity to reflect on our relationship with life and death. Rational thinking which dictates that we are separate from others has also been telling us that we are more important than others. We feel that our lives are more important than the lives of others, especially of those who are different from us. We feel that as long as we are well fed and protected, it does not matter if others are fed and protected or not. In the grand scheme of things, the coronavirus has not killed as many as poverty and hunger do every single day. All over the world, billions were allocated to combat the spread of the virus. But we never feel obliged to allocate similar funds to combat ailments of the poor and the disadvantaged. The wound of that separation and segregation is deep within the body of humanity. However, today we are all facing the same fate. A fate that does not distinguish between rich or poor, white or black, Muslim or Hindu. The virus is collecting us in one basket, urging us to rethink our way of life and giving us ample time to do so. My personal feeling is that the extent of the scar this virus is going to leave on the body of humanity depends on our individual and collective choices. If we start to spread love instead of fear, connect instead of isolate and collaborate instead of compete, we will soon emerge from this crisis into a brighter future. If we decided to stay anchored to our old materialistic and isolationist mentality, then I pray for humanity.
Heartfulness and the coronavirus crisis
This is my interview with Nicole King from Marbella Now TV. I am talking about heartfulness and how it can help us in the time of the coronavirus crisis.
