WAKE UP FROM THE ILLUSION: PHILOSOPHY & THE MATRIX (Return to the Source)

"Have you ever had a dream, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake up from that dream, Neo? How would you know [discern] the difference between the dream world [lie] and the real world [truth]?" –Morpheus

For some, The Matrix is just another sci-fi movie, a slick production from Hollywood's dream factory. But for those who appreciate the philosophy of The Matrix, it is a wake-up call. The movie challenges our understanding of perspective, reality and illusion, and many other intriguing concepts. Here in these videos you will analyze, in brief, the most brilliant and greatest philosophic ideas, as well as the most fascinating spiritual messages encoded in the film.

A group of human succeeds to learn the secret of the Matrix. They form an underground and live aboard a ship, loosely communicating with a halcyon city called Zion , the last bastion of resistance. In one of the scenes Cypher (Lucifer?) one of the rebels defects. Over a glass of (illusory) rubicund wine and (spectral) juicy steak, he poses the main dilemma of the movie:

"Is it better to live ‘happily’ in a perfectly detailed delusion, or to survive ‘unhappily’ but free of its hold?”

Philosophical ideas:
Socrates and Plato (The Cave allegory )
Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason)
Friedrich Nietzsche (Zarathustra - Superman)
Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra & Simulation)
Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia – The Examined life)
Rene Descartes (Evil Genius Deceiver- Meditations of first philosophy)
George Berkeley (New Theory of Vision)
Pierre-Simon Laplace (Exposition of the World’s System)
David Hume (A Treatise of Human nature)
Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation)

DREAM SKEPTICISM
(By Christopher Grau)
Neo has woken up from a hell of a dream — the dream that was his life. How was he to know? The cliché is that if you are dreaming and you pinch yourself, you will wake up. Unfortunately, things aren't quite that simple. It is the nature of most dreams that we take them for reality — while dreaming we are unaware that we are in fact in a dreamworld. Of course, we eventually wake up, and when we do we realize that our experience was all in our mind. Neo's predicament makes one wonder, though: how can any of us be sure that we have ever genuinely woken up? Perhaps, like Neo prior to his downing the red pill, our dreams thus far have in fact been dreams within a dream.

http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/phi.html

Spiritual knowledge:
Christian Gnosticism (The Messiah, Pleroma)
Buddhism (Nirvana, Awakening)
Hinduism (karma, Dharma, Reincarnation)
Taoism (Yin Yang)
Judaism (Kabala)