“Goddammit, Morpheus. Not everyone believes what you believe.” [Locke, The Matrix: Reloaded].
“My beliefs do not require them to.” [Morpheus, The Matrix: Reloaded]
Christians seem to have the hardest time believing that there is someone in this world as intelligent as myself who does not believe in a supreme being. Another thing that these same Christians seem to have a hard time coming to grips with is that I do not believe Jesus was an actual man. Lastly, Christians are the ones who frequently tell me, after they learn of my beliefs that no one else believes what I do.
Just like Morpheus said, my beliefs do not require them to.
Whenever I have spoken with a Jew and told them what I believe, how I came to believe these things, and explained that while I respect their own beliefs, they do not coincide with mine. None of the Jews I have spoken with have had an issue with this fact, they simply live and let live. The Muslims and Wiccans take this same approach. Christians, however, have a different reaction.
I have spoken with the occasional person who falls in line with the people I listed above. They simply understand that I have my own beliefs and they understand that I respect that they have their own. More often than not, though, I run into the following type of Christians.
Some Christians cannot fathom how I do not believe that Jesus existed. My personal belief is that he is nothing more than an amalgamation of those virtues that Christians would like to believe a savior would embody. There is nothing wrong with that, mind you. These are usually the same Christians that believe that Jesus IS God.
My question for that one is: how can someone be both the son AND the father? Sounds like inbreeding to me.
Other Christians do not understand how I cannot believe that there is a supreme being responsible for everything. Why do they believe there IS a supreme being?
The assaults that I have endured from these Christians has caused me to become savvy enough to defend myself against attacks while launching counter attacks on similar “craziness” in Christianity. Why do I counter attack? I counter attack because I don’t take things lying down.
My point in all of this is that organized religion is a form of control. As I’ve stated in previous posts, and as The Matrix trilogy hammers home, we are all victims of control. The whole point of Pathism is to break free of this control.
Relating real life to The Matrix, I find that the indignant Christians are Agents trying to stop me from finding out the truth. In a metaphorical sense, I’m kung fu-ing my way through the Agents to make sure that I can survive. Isn’t The Matrix fun that way?
All I ask is that people respect my beliefs as I respect theirs. The instant (and I do mean instant) someone disrespects me, I disrespect them. So far, that is the only way I’ve been able to quickly get someone’s attention and make them realize that they are breaking their very own religious tenets. (Judge not lest ye be judged, for instance).
Free your mind.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Know Thyself
“Do you know what that means? It means ‘know thyself’. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Being the One is just like being in love. No one can tell you you’re in love, you just know it.” [Oracle, The Matrix].
Know thyself. That is one of the most important things that are conveyed in The Matrix. We all limit ourselves far more than others limit us and something that is important to understand about spirituality is knowing oneself. I know the ways that I limit myself and I realize that I have taken an important step with that knowledge.
Neo knows himself, too. In The Matrix, the Oracle tells him what he needs to hear and only later, in The Matrix: Revolutions, does he realize that he was the one that limited that information, not the Oracle. This all leads to the other big revelation in The Matrix: Reloaded: “No one can see past the choices they don’t understand.” [Oracle, The Matrix: Reloaded].
Simply put, we would all be able to see into the future limitlessly if we just understood why we made the choices we did. For instance, I know that I am choosing something off of the dollar menu today for lunch because I can’t spend anymore. Am I able to see past this choice into the future? In a way, yes. After I get done with lunch, I come back to work. Sure, this happens everyday, but I have a good feeling about this afternoon. Would I be able to know this if I didn’t understand that choice? I don’t think so.
But I digress.
The most important thing in anyone’s life is to understand yourself. Without a working knowledge of what limits you have, what limits you place on yourself, and what you are capable of, you cannot possibly free your mind. The whole point of Pathism is freeing your mind from the control around you.
I am flighty and I am well aware of this fact. Something will keep my interest for a time, fail to keep my attention, then be back as potent as ever later on. You will see a form of this in my posting trends. Yesterday, I posted three times. Today, I might only post once. After today, I might not post again for a week. Since I know myself, I know what to expect.
Currently, I am working to lose weight. My eating habits are the main issue, although I could use a little more exercise. Specifically, portion control is my problem. I still eat like I am 300 pounds. After starting with the Post Office, I have lost 75 pounds (with a burst of physical activity only about once a week) and if I increased my physical activity during the week (which is going to be happening this summer), I could lose even more. However, if I don’t cut down on this portion control issue, I won’t be able to maintain the weight loss over the winter. I know myself, and this will be something difficult to overtake. Starting today, though, I am limiting what I eat. Period.
Is everything I’ve written so far just to give all of you more information about me? No, the intent is to get you to evaluate yourself. Sure, you can hire someone to investigate your habits and mannerisms to determine what it is that is limiting your ability to achieve your personal goals, but when you can do that yourself for free, why spend money on someone else?
My goals in life will be accomplished because I am taking steps to see them through. One of those goals is being accomplished as I sit and write this because The Matrix is not understood by the masses they way it should be. Sure, there are those who claim to know the real truth behind The Matrix, but those same folks will turn around and criticize the movies for lacking a “twist ending.” Why do you need a twist ending? There was, in fact, a twist ending, but that ending did not satisfy the doubters. That is fine by me, but don’t break down what you don’t understand simply because you wanted a different ending. Accept the “bible” of The Matrix for what it is.
Free your mind.
Know thyself. That is one of the most important things that are conveyed in The Matrix. We all limit ourselves far more than others limit us and something that is important to understand about spirituality is knowing oneself. I know the ways that I limit myself and I realize that I have taken an important step with that knowledge.
Neo knows himself, too. In The Matrix, the Oracle tells him what he needs to hear and only later, in The Matrix: Revolutions, does he realize that he was the one that limited that information, not the Oracle. This all leads to the other big revelation in The Matrix: Reloaded: “No one can see past the choices they don’t understand.” [Oracle, The Matrix: Reloaded].
Simply put, we would all be able to see into the future limitlessly if we just understood why we made the choices we did. For instance, I know that I am choosing something off of the dollar menu today for lunch because I can’t spend anymore. Am I able to see past this choice into the future? In a way, yes. After I get done with lunch, I come back to work. Sure, this happens everyday, but I have a good feeling about this afternoon. Would I be able to know this if I didn’t understand that choice? I don’t think so.
But I digress.
The most important thing in anyone’s life is to understand yourself. Without a working knowledge of what limits you have, what limits you place on yourself, and what you are capable of, you cannot possibly free your mind. The whole point of Pathism is freeing your mind from the control around you.
I am flighty and I am well aware of this fact. Something will keep my interest for a time, fail to keep my attention, then be back as potent as ever later on. You will see a form of this in my posting trends. Yesterday, I posted three times. Today, I might only post once. After today, I might not post again for a week. Since I know myself, I know what to expect.
Currently, I am working to lose weight. My eating habits are the main issue, although I could use a little more exercise. Specifically, portion control is my problem. I still eat like I am 300 pounds. After starting with the Post Office, I have lost 75 pounds (with a burst of physical activity only about once a week) and if I increased my physical activity during the week (which is going to be happening this summer), I could lose even more. However, if I don’t cut down on this portion control issue, I won’t be able to maintain the weight loss over the winter. I know myself, and this will be something difficult to overtake. Starting today, though, I am limiting what I eat. Period.
Is everything I’ve written so far just to give all of you more information about me? No, the intent is to get you to evaluate yourself. Sure, you can hire someone to investigate your habits and mannerisms to determine what it is that is limiting your ability to achieve your personal goals, but when you can do that yourself for free, why spend money on someone else?
My goals in life will be accomplished because I am taking steps to see them through. One of those goals is being accomplished as I sit and write this because The Matrix is not understood by the masses they way it should be. Sure, there are those who claim to know the real truth behind The Matrix, but those same folks will turn around and criticize the movies for lacking a “twist ending.” Why do you need a twist ending? There was, in fact, a twist ending, but that ending did not satisfy the doubters. That is fine by me, but don’t break down what you don’t understand simply because you wanted a different ending. Accept the “bible” of The Matrix for what it is.
Free your mind.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Free Your Mind
Something important that makes The Matrix work on many levels is the suspension of disbelief. Any form of entertainment requires some sort of suspension of disbelief, allowing the storyteller to properly convey what they are attempting to convey. The Matrix asks the viewer to suspend one’s disbelief in a way that no other movie has ever before: The Matrix asks you to free your mind.
The opening sequence of The Matrix, the one where Trinity escapes from Agents over rooftops, is meant to set the stage for the rest of the trilogy. I remember wondering how the Wachowski Brothers would explain away the ability to leap from one building to another that was not possible with the physical constraints of the world I live in. The explanation I got, in retrospect, was a lot deeper than anything else the movie conveys.
Recently, there has been a book released that infers that simply thinking something makes that thing true. If you believe that you are successful, you are successful. Believing you are thin will make you thin. This book, denounced by the Christian church, reinforces one of the pillars of The Matrix: free your mind.
There are many rules in the world we live in. Something that The Matrix wants you to understand is something that Morpheus was trying to get Neo to understand early on: “What you must learn is that these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent, others broken.” [Morpheus, The Matrix]. Simply put: free your mind.
I once had a friend that thought that in order to get himself to achieve natural human flight, all he had to do what throw himself at the ground and miss. While this sounds completely asinine, how true is that statement? Years later, I now understand that this friend had a stronger grasp on the concepts that I am just now learning than I gave him credit for. So, does that mean natural human flight is possible just by missing the ground? You tell me.
Our minds, from birth, are indoctrinated with information that has been established to be “ultimate truth.” Fish live in water, humans are only capable of so much, and we are all limited by the natural laws. Are any of these things ultimate or true?
The same friend that I just referenced also said that fish don’t exist. We have been taught all of our lives to believe that fish exist but they don’t. Thus, we expect to see fish in the oceans and so fish exist in the oceans. He pointed out that anyone who eats fish is usually hungry afterwards because, in essence, they ate nothing. While this is a little more “out there” than my flying example, the idea does raise an interesting doubt: do fish exist? Does anything really exist?
Humans are only capable of so much. That sentence strikes down any great achievement, takes away any hope that our potential is without bounds, and that everyone will eventually “hit a wall.” Why are humans only capable of so much? Where is the limitless potential of free thought?
We are all limited by the natural laws. Gravity, time, and physics are just some of these natural laws but these are the things that Morpheus explains to Neo that can be bent. Time isn’t one of them, but it is still a natural law.
In The Matrix, if you are in the computer generated Matrix, things are not always as they appear. We see this fact in life many times but no one truly grasps that this concept can be much more than a difference in perception. What happens if I stop realizing that gravity can hold me down? Many could explain my jumping higher or farther is a product of adrenaline but would you consider the possibility that I simply stopped paying attention to the natural laws?
There are numerous stories about people lifting cars off of loved ones and almost all of these stories are given a relation to adrenaline. While I do not discount the existence or effect of adrenaline, why is this the only possible answer? In times of crisis, are natural laws even in your mind? I know that if my wife were pinned underneath a vehicle and I had to remove it to save her, I would KNOW that I could lift that car. If I could only KNOW more in life, maybe I could bend more “laws.”
At the end of the opening sequence in The Matrix, Trinity has a way out (a safe place to go from the Agents). In real life, we don’t have a place to escape to (at least that we know of). We are bound by what we’ve been taught to believe all of our lives, reinforced by hundreds of others over the course of thousands of years. I think it’s time that we all opened our minds to accept the possibility that something out there exists that wasn’t just as someone else taught us? If I really believed that I could do something that shouldn’t be possible, would I be able to do it?
The key is the complete openness of the mind. You’d have to stop thinking like the billions of other sheeple in this world and start thinking that anything is possible at anytime. In the end, the key to achieving something impossible is doing exactly what I say at the ends of my posts.
Free your mind.
The opening sequence of The Matrix, the one where Trinity escapes from Agents over rooftops, is meant to set the stage for the rest of the trilogy. I remember wondering how the Wachowski Brothers would explain away the ability to leap from one building to another that was not possible with the physical constraints of the world I live in. The explanation I got, in retrospect, was a lot deeper than anything else the movie conveys.
Recently, there has been a book released that infers that simply thinking something makes that thing true. If you believe that you are successful, you are successful. Believing you are thin will make you thin. This book, denounced by the Christian church, reinforces one of the pillars of The Matrix: free your mind.
There are many rules in the world we live in. Something that The Matrix wants you to understand is something that Morpheus was trying to get Neo to understand early on: “What you must learn is that these rules are no different than the rules of a computer system. Some of them can be bent, others broken.” [Morpheus, The Matrix]. Simply put: free your mind.
I once had a friend that thought that in order to get himself to achieve natural human flight, all he had to do what throw himself at the ground and miss. While this sounds completely asinine, how true is that statement? Years later, I now understand that this friend had a stronger grasp on the concepts that I am just now learning than I gave him credit for. So, does that mean natural human flight is possible just by missing the ground? You tell me.
Our minds, from birth, are indoctrinated with information that has been established to be “ultimate truth.” Fish live in water, humans are only capable of so much, and we are all limited by the natural laws. Are any of these things ultimate or true?
The same friend that I just referenced also said that fish don’t exist. We have been taught all of our lives to believe that fish exist but they don’t. Thus, we expect to see fish in the oceans and so fish exist in the oceans. He pointed out that anyone who eats fish is usually hungry afterwards because, in essence, they ate nothing. While this is a little more “out there” than my flying example, the idea does raise an interesting doubt: do fish exist? Does anything really exist?
Humans are only capable of so much. That sentence strikes down any great achievement, takes away any hope that our potential is without bounds, and that everyone will eventually “hit a wall.” Why are humans only capable of so much? Where is the limitless potential of free thought?
We are all limited by the natural laws. Gravity, time, and physics are just some of these natural laws but these are the things that Morpheus explains to Neo that can be bent. Time isn’t one of them, but it is still a natural law.
In The Matrix, if you are in the computer generated Matrix, things are not always as they appear. We see this fact in life many times but no one truly grasps that this concept can be much more than a difference in perception. What happens if I stop realizing that gravity can hold me down? Many could explain my jumping higher or farther is a product of adrenaline but would you consider the possibility that I simply stopped paying attention to the natural laws?
There are numerous stories about people lifting cars off of loved ones and almost all of these stories are given a relation to adrenaline. While I do not discount the existence or effect of adrenaline, why is this the only possible answer? In times of crisis, are natural laws even in your mind? I know that if my wife were pinned underneath a vehicle and I had to remove it to save her, I would KNOW that I could lift that car. If I could only KNOW more in life, maybe I could bend more “laws.”
At the end of the opening sequence in The Matrix, Trinity has a way out (a safe place to go from the Agents). In real life, we don’t have a place to escape to (at least that we know of). We are bound by what we’ve been taught to believe all of our lives, reinforced by hundreds of others over the course of thousands of years. I think it’s time that we all opened our minds to accept the possibility that something out there exists that wasn’t just as someone else taught us? If I really believed that I could do something that shouldn’t be possible, would I be able to do it?
The key is the complete openness of the mind. You’d have to stop thinking like the billions of other sheeple in this world and start thinking that anything is possible at anytime. In the end, the key to achieving something impossible is doing exactly what I say at the ends of my posts.
Free your mind.
Hedons and Symbology
The other “religion” (i.e. cult) that is based on The Matrix condones, and even encourages, the use of drugs as part of worship. Anyone that condones and encourages the destruction of the human body is not someone I want to be associated with. In regards to their pedestrian and childish attempt at getting attention is nothing more than a cry for help. Drugs do not help one achieve anything except incarceration or permanent physical damage.
Something that they won’t tell you “over there” is that if you notice in the movie, the drug users are depicted as unintelligent and hopelessly trapped. How do I get this out of The Matrix? The girl with the white rabbit tattoo and her drug-laden loser boyfriend are stuck in the Matrix and after the initial contact with Neo, we never see them again. An obscure reference to a version of The Matrix script has Neo asking Morpheus if the red pill is mescaline but that did not make it into the final version of the film. Why would you base a religious tenet off of something that never happened?
In reality, the red pill is a metaphor. Because Morpheus needs to know where Neo is located in the fields, something needs to “disrupt his input/output carrier signal.” [Morpheus, The Matrix]. The red pill is nothing more than a program. Those who take the red pill are interested in seeing a larger world, not hindering themselves by limiting their body’s capability to function properly.
Keep in mind that Neo was awakened as an adult; something Morpheus said was against their rules. So, feeding drugs to children (as the “other religion” would suggest) is a sick and twisted thing.
I wanted to address this other faction because belief in what they are putting out there is just another form of control. The whole point of Neo’s quest is to break through all the levels of control into true freedom. How can you free your mind if you hinder the mind’s ability to function?
The use of a symbol to identify a religion is something that has been used for hundreds of years by many religions. That symbol should be something unique or at least spark an immediate identification with the religion in question. “They” have chosen to use the kanji character for red, relating to red pills. How is that readily identifiable without their religion’s title underneath it? For Pathism, there has also been a symbol chosen to represent the religion. That symbol is a slightly “smoothed out” version of the MegaCity character (displayed in the opening title of The Matrix: Revolutions). I will post the symbol in the very near future.
Free your mind.
Something that they won’t tell you “over there” is that if you notice in the movie, the drug users are depicted as unintelligent and hopelessly trapped. How do I get this out of The Matrix? The girl with the white rabbit tattoo and her drug-laden loser boyfriend are stuck in the Matrix and after the initial contact with Neo, we never see them again. An obscure reference to a version of The Matrix script has Neo asking Morpheus if the red pill is mescaline but that did not make it into the final version of the film. Why would you base a religious tenet off of something that never happened?
In reality, the red pill is a metaphor. Because Morpheus needs to know where Neo is located in the fields, something needs to “disrupt his input/output carrier signal.” [Morpheus, The Matrix]. The red pill is nothing more than a program. Those who take the red pill are interested in seeing a larger world, not hindering themselves by limiting their body’s capability to function properly.
Keep in mind that Neo was awakened as an adult; something Morpheus said was against their rules. So, feeding drugs to children (as the “other religion” would suggest) is a sick and twisted thing.
I wanted to address this other faction because belief in what they are putting out there is just another form of control. The whole point of Neo’s quest is to break through all the levels of control into true freedom. How can you free your mind if you hinder the mind’s ability to function?
The use of a symbol to identify a religion is something that has been used for hundreds of years by many religions. That symbol should be something unique or at least spark an immediate identification with the religion in question. “They” have chosen to use the kanji character for red, relating to red pills. How is that readily identifiable without their religion’s title underneath it? For Pathism, there has also been a symbol chosen to represent the religion. That symbol is a slightly “smoothed out” version of the MegaCity character (displayed in the opening title of The Matrix: Revolutions). I will post the symbol in the very near future.
Free your mind.
The Path of the One: The Matrix Religion
If you are reading this, you have probably come from one of three reasons:
- You think I'm a nutball.
- You are a doubter in the meaning in The Matrix.
- You are a believe The Matrix is a religious experience.
I am the third one. You can debate that fact all you want but rather than simply stand on the sidelines, I'd like to discuss the facets of The Matrix, The Animatrix, The Matrix: Reloaded, The Matrix: Revolutions in a meaningful context. There are websites that do something similar to this but many fail to address the religious component that I intend to focus on.
Here is where I've either gained your support or lost you. Either way, I am okay with that.
What will appear on this website will be my "sermons" or essays on The Matrix trilogy and what the series means to me. I ask you to join me in reading along and find whatever meaning you would like in my new religion: Pathism. (Because I follow the Path of the One, and because some idiot has already bastardized "Matrixism," so I want to avoid the negative association with him.)
Free your mind.
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