Are we in the Matrix

Are We in the Matrix?

In the movie, The Matrix, Liam is asked to choose the red pill or the blue bill. Choosing blue means you continue in the reality that is familiar to him. Choosing the red is to enter the reality that is the true reality. When I first saw this film, I didn’t  perceive the significance of the pills and judged it a weird sci-fi movie. I didn’t reflect on it any further.  Sometimes it takes a while to assess reality! However, a few people I knew began to talk about the religious themes they saw in it. How come I didn’t see that?

Since the covid lockdown, I’ve begun to wonder about the world I daily perceive. More and more of my world is warped by realities that I find foreign and unacceptable. Trusted institutions have adopted new ideologies that conflict with my convictions about truth and history. Everywhere I turn truth is questionable  and the world I knew is less reliable. The threat of chips implanted in our bodies and government controlling our bank accounts, work, travel, health, religion and education sounds more a a mechanized robotic existence and not what we were destined for at our creation.

Our schools no longer the basics. Now teachers are expected to teach sex education, gender identity and altered versions of history. Time spent on math, science, literature, history and creative thinking is squeezed out to make time to blame our current social problems on race, guilting the middle class and choosing your pronoun of the day. This is more indoctrination than education! Is it any wonder teachers are leaving their careers in droves? Our schools are already among the lowest rated in the world.  These perspectives are a false version of reality. Yet we still must choose which one we want to live in and in which to bring up our children. Red? or Blue? Isn’t it funny that those same colors identify our current political parties?

I’d propose another option, a gold pill. The gold is pure truth. We are humans made in the image of God and were created as male and female, as is most of nature. Any other description is unnatural. This physical creation is good just as God made it but that is only part of the reality of our humanness. We are also Spirit and that is our truer reality. We were made for the Spirit world or rather to live in the world of the Spirit because that is our final destiny. Yes, there are aberrations in nature and in humans but they are not the norm. Animals and trees do not share our destiny. They live, die and return to the soil. Our fleshly body does too, but our spirit lives on in “another dimension” so to speak. Somewhat like the matrix. 

Unlike in the movie, the other world is not destroyed by the matrix controllers. It is perfect and all who live there have been perfected through the burnishing struggles experienced during their bodily sojourn on earth. The life we know and perhaps think is all there is, is merely a period of working on becoming the best version of ourselves that we can make and with divine grace and Christ’s redemptive suffering are perfected for the world that is our intended destiny. This isn’t all there is! That was the shocking truth that Liam discovered.

However, if we choose to live solely for what this earthly world offers with no effort toward perfection we are threatened with its loss forever.