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.