Are we in the Matrix?

Audiences worldwide have been captured by the mind-bending storyline of the Matrix trilogy and their phenomenal special effects, but the perennial question remains: What does it all mean?

Am I the only person who has thought "what if this really is the Matrix - what if it's all made up?"  In training and coaching interventions, clips from the Matrix are great to encourage people to look at how they are personally making up their own reality. So is there a definitive meaning for this stuff?

The Matrix trilogy is the most successful cinematic venture of the past several decades. Together, The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions have grossed billions of dollars worldwide, and the story continues with The Animatrix, The Matrix Comics, and The Matrix Online.

Larry and Andy Wachowski, the writers and directors of The Matrix trilogy, have been reluctant to share their interpretation of the films, fearing that whatever they said would turn into dogma.  However, according to a recent piece on integral naked this did present a problem for Warner Brothers when producing The Matrix DVD boxed set. 

How do you have a director's commentary—a must for any boxed set—when the directors refuse to comment?

What the Wachowskis did was to ask Ken Wilber and Cornel West to do the director's commentary on all three films.  Ken and Cornel recorded 15 hours of commentary, which has been edited down to 6 hours to fit the 3 films, and the boxed set with all 3 films—and 6 hours of Ken and Cornel's commentary—will be released in October.

In a conversation between Ken Wilber and Larry on Integral Naked, Larry explains, the movies were in many ways designed not to give answers, but to introduce questions. What does it mean to be human? What is reality? Who is in control? Does God exist? and so on.

If Larry was to explain what he thought the movies meant, he would be providing people with another concept of reality to either accept or reject—either way, the open space created by the question would vanish.

The Matrix injected mainstream culture with a straight shot of the surreal, where fact and fiction and truth and appearance are not grounded in a single pre-given "reality," because reality is simply what appears to be real.  In a dream, the dream is real—until you wake up.  In the Matrix too, the Matrix is real—until you wake up. But what if you never woke up? It's questions like that, that Larry wished to inspire.

The first movie is fairly easy to "understand" - everything in the Matrix is bad, everything outside of the Matrix is good. Everyone inside the Matrix is trapped, everyone outside the Matrix is free, and so on. But twenty minutes into part 2, Reloaded, and the audience discovers that the Oracle is a machine program, at which point most people don't know what to think?

What had begun as a simple good guy/bad guy movie had just become a complex piece of literature, with different levels of interpretation and a very sophisticated model of reality.

Ken Wilber suggests that it's not until the last twenty minutes of part 3, Revolutions, that the key to the trilogy is revealed: although—and perhaps because—Neo is physically blind, he sees the machines as luminous, golden light—not quite how the "bad guys" are seen in most movies.

And yet Neo is unmistakable in what he says to Trinity: "If you could see them as I see them, they are all made of Light...." Indeed, the machines represent Spirit, but Spirit as alienated and therefore attacking....

Thus, if you step back and take into account what is revealed in all three films, Zion represents body (filmed in blue tint), the Matrix represents mind (green tint), and the machines—represent spirit (golden tint).  This is indeed quite similar to the Great Nest of Being as taught by the world's wisdom traditions, a spectrum of being and consciousness reaching from body to mind to spirit.

Borrowing from the wisdom of Christian mysticism, "The flames of Hell are but God's love denied," and so an alienated and dissociated spirit manifests as an army of machines bent on destroying humankind. It is only in the integration of body, mind, and spirit that all three are redeemed and peace returns.

The Wachowskis did not want their own original intent to overpower the equally legitimate viewer response, and so they remained silent about their original intent.  There is no single, definitive interpretation of The Matrix, because the sum total of perspectives is infinite.