“The Matrix trilogy suggests that everyone has the individual responsibility to make the choice between the real world and an artificial world. Though Neo is the exemplar of free will, fate plays a large role in his adventure. Neo relies on the Oracle, and everything she says comes true in some way.” Google Search.
The original movie, The Matrix, was released in 1999, highlighting the idea that we are all enslaved within a formidable fortress, the prison of our own minds – based upon human conditioning. Neuroscience and Development Psychology would agree that our mental constructs and ways of seeing the world are largely established in the first 25 years due to personal experience of the environment or culture we grow up in. Through nuclear family pressure, organized religion conformity, formal education competition, and media exposure, we learn to think, feel, and behave in very particular ways. Because the human brain only fully integrates at 25, the matrix develops unconsciously, moment by moment, experience by experience, as pain and pleasure direct our neural pathways. By the time we are ready to make a meaningful contribution to society, we are largely programmed to perpetuate the prevailing social norms and values. As fate would have it, we become slaves within a slave culture, as our precious time, and the finite lifeforce within us, is consumed doing what has always been done. Inevitably we die, but how many of us really live?
The Matrix is driven by comparison, evaluation, and judgement, all advanced human faculties to help us not only survive but integrate and prosper. The downside of this ability is that we pay more attention to what is going on around us, through our five senses of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling, than to what is going on inside of us, engaging our sixth sense of intuition. As a result, most of us operate with an external locus of control, at the mercy of our environment. We are caught in the matrix, because our minds themselves are governed by matrix logic and beliefs, enslaving us to social norms and values we had little to do with choosing. Unfortunately, due to comparison, evaluation, and judgement, what you do to others, will be done to you, by yourself. Hence, the high levels of conflict, dysfunction, disease, addiction, poverty, unemployment, and unhappiness we see in the world today. I spent most of my first 60 years surviving the matrix, until the toxicity of it all came spilling out – clinical depression and prostate cancer were nature’s way of telling me to change direction. Fortunately, what didn’t kill me made me stronger, and thanks to my own and other’s efforts, I escaped the matrix of my own conditioned mind, developing an internal locus of control. I now know that what is going on inside of me is just as important, if not more important, than what is going on around me.
It all boils down to the nature versus nurture debate. How much of who we are is nature and genes, and how much is nurture and environment? I finally understood that the history of ‘human’ genes is extremely long, whilst the history of ‘human’ environment is relatively short, if not insignificant. We are comparing 700 000 000 years of life with 7 000 years of civilization, so I know where I am putting my money! Who we are is a far older, wiser, wild creature, than merely a civilized human. It’s time to reestablish a connection with our primordial natures, moving us towards authenticity and reality, and away from the ‘smoke and mirror constructs’ that have enslaved humanity’s thinking, feeling, and behaving for the better part of 4 000 years. By learning to nurture our natures, we access a 700 000 000-year journey of overcoming ‘gene-iterations’, not merely a 70-, 700-, or 7 000-year period of social manipulation and control by ‘well-intended’ significant others. This is what true independence is all about, when you become a fully autonomous and responsible creature, able to self-govern from a deep appreciation of self, and therefore others, including the environment on which we all depend.
In my practice I teach clients to nurture their nature, developing their intuition through conscious breathing, emotional regulation, the work of mental flexibility, and meditation. They are practices of presence, which can be taught to children between the ages of 10 and 12 in senior primary school, before the growth and sex hormones send them spinning further into the ever-waiting arms of the matrix, and the Oracles that may otherwise determine their neural pathways and their fate.