The 'red pill' in The Matrix movie has become a trope for awakening someone from a world of illusions, a Virtuality; but the movie - being a mainstream product - gets the effect significantly wrong.
In the The Matrix the red pill taker awakens from normal, modern, everyday reality to a nightmarish physical situation in which humans are used as 'batteries' - which makes little sense. But the original idea was that that the red-piller would realise that his human brain was one of millions interconnected to form a vast living computer - which makes a lot more sense. Anyway, the sequence goes from a pleasant but false imagined fake-reality; to an horrific physical reality.
We certainly live already and increasingly in a fake and manipulative Matrix world of Virtuality; but the real waking-up is to a mental horror; not a physical horror. It is awakening to recognise that what we have being believing and wanting and striving-for is evil.
...Waking to discover that we have been actively arguing and working-for the implementation of a totalitarian world of humans under omni-surveillance and micro-control with the objective of persuading us to hate virtue, beauty and truth and love their opposite; persuading us to reject God, Good and Heaven and instead actively to desire our own damnation.
To live in the Matrix is to live wholly within The System - which is, increasingly The World; and therefore to live by the values of The System.
To awaken is to recognise and to experience another world beyond The System, outside Virtuality; and to recognise that it is the Real World.
But this awakened-to Real World is not physical, but Christian and 'spiritual; however, it is not just spiritual - nor is it 'oridinary' Christianity as externally instantiated in Book, Institution, Behaviours: rather the awakening is to the here-and-now experience of chosen-conscious-active participation in the divine work of loving creation.
I have called this Real World: Romantic Christianity.
It is not a world that we can dwell-in on a lasting basis, this side of the portal that is death; but it is more than a mere 'glimpse' or 'taste' of Heaven to come (if we want Heaven); it is a mild and brief experience of what it is to be in Heaven.
So (contra the movie); the real red pill experience of wakening out-from the Matrix is not just pleasant, nor just happy: it is literally Heavenly.
2 comments:
"but it is more than a mere 'glimpse' or 'taste' of Heaven to come"
Though not a Mormon, I am not threatened by Mormon theology like some mainstream Christians apparently are. Bruce's reflections on the centrality of warm and loving family life ring true to me. My own glimpses often involve a profound sense of an eternal loving family dynamic that borders on physical sensation.
"So (contra the movie); the real red pill experience of wakening out-from the Matrix is not just pleasant, nor just happy: it is literally Heavenly."
Great message! Says it all and says it perfectly.
It's definitely time to get off the bitter meds and get on Reality instead.
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