Maya and the Matrix: Reloading the Cosmic Dream

By Craig Titley

“What is the Matrix?” In the last year of the second millennium this question appeared around the world on billboards and bus stops, in shopping malls and sports arenas, all part of an advertising blitz designed to generate interest in an unheard of motion picture, starring a B-level actor, written and directed by an unknown pair of brothers, and set to be dumped into the marketplace during a season when the studios generally release the films in which they have the least amount of faith. However, the world was very interested in the answer to the provocative question, and The Matrix, along with its two sequels, went on to gross over 1.6 billion dollars in worldwide box office and became an international phenomenon. Though it may be tempting to dismiss the film as mere pop entertainment, its “collective, intuitive acceptance” (Zimmer 40) cannot be ignored--its profitability is secondary to its prophet-ability. The reason for the unique success of The Matrix phenomenon may very well be that the film reshapes, contemporizes, and visualizes a perennial Hindu philosophy. The question “What is the Matrix?” first posited in 1999 is no different than the question the ascetic Narada asked of Vishnu countless millennia ago: “’let me comprehend your Maya’” (qtd. in Zimmer 29). If, as Heinrich Zimmer contends, the philosophies contained within Hinduism’s mythical tales “thrive on the ever-renewed assent of successive generations” (Zimmer 40) then we will see that The Matrix has served Maya well. By examining the film’s philosophical underpinnings and comparing and contrasting them to the original Hindu philosophical construct, we hope to gain new insight into old questions: What is the nature of Maya? What is its source? How does one peel back the curtain? What is the “reality” that lies behind it? And finally, why was Maya created?

Maya, in Hindu religion and philosophy, is the world-as-illusion, it is the “measuring out, or creation, or display of forms” (Zimmer 24). In Myths of Light, Joseph Campbell calls it “the world of that rippling pond [...], the fractured sparkling image of reality that is no reality but only its broken surface” (48). He further describes it as a prism through which the “forms of the world are projected” (49). Nearly twenty-five hundred years earlier, in what could perhaps be the first Western attempt to “unveil” Maya, Plato, in his “Allegory of the Cave,” described these forms as distorted shadows projected onto a cave wall and accepted as “reality” by the bound humans who witness them (Rep. VII, 205-208). In the early nineteenth century Arthur Schopenhauer, working onward from Plato’s theory of Forms and Ideas, calls this shadowy Maya-world the “world as idea subordinated to the principal of sufficient reason” (8) and refers to Maya as the “veil of deception which covers the eyes of mortals, and makes them see a world of which one cannot say either that it is, or that it is not: for it is like a dream” (8). And finally, at the end of the millennium, the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix brought the concept of Maya into the modern computer age where the world-as-we-know-it is visualized and intellectualized as a virtual cyber-world known as the Matrix:
The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around you, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you got to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

The deceptive world of the Matrix is clearly Maya and, according to Zimmer, “Maya is Existence” (25). But what is the source of this illusory world of existence?

“The Power of Illusion,” according to Alain DaniÈlou, “may be compared to an introspective deliberation (vimarsa) which would plan things. It may be represented as a ‘divine thought’ of which the Universe would be the materialization” (DaniÈlou 29). This generative Divine Thinker is Vishnu in the tales of Narada and Markandeya. However, when perceived in terms of Schopenhauer’s Will or a collective substratum, the Hindu myths and philosophies that see Brahma as the Divine Thinker seems more appropriate:
The source of the manifest world is [...] neither Visnu nor Siva, neither concentration nor dispersion, but the result of their opposition, their equilbrium [...]. The Immense-Being (Brahma), masculine or personified form of the Immensity (brahman), represents the possibility of existence resulting from the union of opposites. Hence Brahma is the source, the seed, of all that is. (DaniÈlou 232)

This “union of opposites” as a source of Maya is a key to understanding the Cosmic Dream. “The secret of Maya,” according to Zimmer, “is opposites. Maya is a simultaneous-and-successive manifestation of energies that are at variance with each other, process contradicting and annihilating each other” (46). It is not surprising then, that the source of the Matrix is revealed to be a simply binary brain: a machine. Furthermore, we learn in The Matrix Reloaded, that the Matrix design was born of a father (“The Architect”) and a mother (“The Oracle”). We will return to this dual source of the Maya/Matrix once we have analyzed the escape, the awakening from the Cosmic Dream.

“Wake up, Neo... The Matrix has you.” This simple message appearing on Neo’s computer screen at the beginning of The Matrix is his first clue that the world he lives in may not be real. One of the most common metaphors for Maya is the dream, and in the Hindu tales of Narada and Markandeya, it is Vishnu who dreams the universe over and over again in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. “Vishnu’s Maya,” reveals the poet Vyasa, “is our collective dream” (qtd. in Zimmer 28). When Neo, the hero archetype in The Matrix, first encounters Morpheus (his guide out of the cyber Maya-world), Morpheus comments that Neo has “the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.” Neo’s questioning of Morpheus about the Matrix is similar to the exchange Narada had with Vishnu after asking to comprehend the Maya. “No one can comprehend my Maya,” says Visnu. “No one has ever comprehended it. There will never be anyone capable of penetrating to its secret” (qtd. in Zimmer 30). In a similar manner, Morpheus’ tells Neo “no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.” Morpheus then offers Neo a choice between a blue pill (ignorance) and a red pill (liberation):

This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Neo chooses the red pill and awakens to discover that he is inside a water-filled cocoon with dozens of tubes plugged to his body. He rises out of the water, takes his first natural breath, and rips away the tubes, disconnecting himself from the Matrix. As he looks around, he sees millions and millions of cocoons, all containing oblivious humans who, like those denizens chained up in Plato’s cave, have no idea that the world they are currently experiencing (virtually, in their minds) is merely a parade of shadows. Immediately after Neo breaks free of his bonds, he is flushed out of the system and into a pool of murky water in the real world where he is left to drown (having been cocooned since birth, every muscle in his body has atrophied). Morpheus, who had escaped from the Matrix many years previously, pulls Neo from his watery grave and welcomes him “to the real world.” Neo has just experienced Maya.

Water plays a key role in the awakening of both Neo and Narada for, as Zimmer reminds us, “to dive into the water means to delve into the mystery of Maya, to quest after the ultimate secret of life” (Zimmer 34). Narada takes his “red pill” by diving into the waters and is transformed into a woman. He proceeded to live an entire life of joy and sorrow as this woman, unaware of his previous incarnation. Vishnu then pulls Narada out of the water. He, like Neo, has just experience Maya. “You are not what you fancy yourself to be,’ was the lesson implied in the startling experience that overwhelmed [Narada] when he was for but an instant submerged” (Zimmer 45). Narada realizes that reality is a never-ending cycle, built and then taken apart with seemingly machine-like precision and callousness time and time again. One individual, one lifetime, is meaningless. Neo likewise realizes that the real world is a dark and desolate wasteland that had been conquered by machines. It is literally being run with machine-like precision and callousness. Human beings are farmed, plugged into the Matrix to keep them happy and oblivious, and used as an energy source for the machines and to generate the power for the very illusions that are used to enslave them.

Narada and Neo’s realization of the bleak world behind the mask of Maya is what naturalist/philosopher John Burroughs refers to as the “cosmic chill,” the realization that “[t]he universe is going its own way with no thought of us” (119). “We have been so long housed in our comfortable little anthropomorphic creeds, with their artificial warmth and light, that when we are suddenly turned out of doors by this thought, we experience, I say, the cosmic chill” (119). It is human nature to fear the “cosmic chill” and to do everything in our power to avoid its sting, even if it means remaining shackled. But our fear is unwarranted. “We fear death that is eternal sleep because of our failure to understand its significance,” says Alain DaniÈlou. “Man, in his world of illusions, fears death, even though it means for him liberation from bondage, all that is to be desired” (198). This is the truth behind Maya and the Matrix:

NEO. What truth?

MORPHEUS. That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.

In order to avoid the “cosmic chill,” we allow ourselves to become imprisoned by what Indra, after witnessing the parade of ants, realizes to be the “burdens and delights, possessions and bereavements of the ego, the whole content and the work of a human lifetime” (Zimmer 23). Prior to his encounter with Morpheus, Neo’s life in the Matrix was purely a life of ego. He had a nice corporate job as a computer programmer, an apartment filled with all the latest computer technology, and he could make an easy two grand in under-the-table cash by selling illegal computer programs on the side. Yet his ego was, as Zimmer says, “trapped in a web, a queer cocoon” (26) of aspirations and desires. “We see,” says Schopenhauer, [...] the fulfillment of these masquerades as the ultimate objective of our willing, but once we have attained them, they no longer look the same, so that soon, forgotten and out of date, they are almost always set aside (even if we do not admit it) as vanished illusions. (85)

But once Neo takes the red pill, he is literally freed from a queer cocoon, the trappings of his ego, and realizes just as Indra had, that “’All this around me,’ and ‘my own experience’—-experience without and experience within—-are the warp and woof of the subtle fabric” (Zimmer 26). Joseph Campbell warns us where these trappings will lead: “This is an age of deterioration [...] just look at everything that we call progress: it is the exteriorization of life; the machines are talking over” (Campbell 58). Indeed.

Yet not everyone, especially in the West, is so eager to take the red pill and step out of the machine. When Morpheus and Neo, now able to enter and exit the Matrix at will, take a virtual stroll down a bustling city street in the Matrix, Morpheus reveals, “most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependant on the system, that they will fight to protect it.” In perhaps the film’s boldest comment on Western complacency within the Maya/Matrix we see Cipher, one of the people that Morpheus has freed from the Matrix, cutting a deal with one of the machine world’s agents. Over a steak dinner in the virtual Matrix world, Cipher agrees to lead the machines to Morpheus and Neo in exchange for being plugged back into the Matrix:

I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling me that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years [outside the Matrix] you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

Why are we so eager to resist knowledge and embrace ignorance? When we consider how tempting and tantalizing the Maya-world is compared to what actually lies behind the veil, we realize that the Cosmic Dreamer is complicit in our choice to slumber. “At every stage of manifestation, the causal power appears as the veil of unknowing. As an obstacle to knowledge which prevents the seer from piercing the secret of illusion, from defeating it and reducing the world to nothingness” (DaniÈlou 33). Why experience the “Cosmic Chill” when you can just chill (in front of the television, playing with an xbox, eating pizza...). This brings us to the baffling paradox of Maya. “Having mothered the universe and the individual (macro- and microcosm) as correlative manifestations of the divine, Maya then immediately muffles consciousness within the wrappings of her perishable production” (Zimmer 26). To solve this riddle we, like Neo in Matrix Revolutions (the Wachowski Brothers’ the final installment of The Matrix trilogy), must return to the source.

In the world of The Matrix, machines have enslaved humankind while at the same time being enslaved by them: for the machines derive their power from human “batteries.” It is the current equilibrium in a long struggle between humans and machines in which they have been simultaneous and successive creators and destroys of each other. No one is sure how long this struggle has lasted and in The Matrix Reloaded we learn that there have been six previous incarnations of the Matrix, six previous incarnations of Neo, and six previous destructions of the human world. It’s the machine world own cycle of cyber-samsara. Throughout these cycles there has been a semiotic relationship between the humans and machines. They cannot exist without each other. The same is true in our world. “Maya is equally the source of the cosmos and of the consciousness that perceives it. Both are interdependent. The nonperceived cosmos has no existence and the nonperceiving consciousness no reality” (DaniÈlou 30). Translation: they are one and the same. What both the Maya and the Matrix are trying to hide from us is the oneness of all creation. This is why the web has been spun.

Everything in the work of manifestation is intended to create the illusion of multiplicity and to prevent the realization of the basic oneness of all beings, for this would lead to the destruction of the notion of I-ness, which is the power of cohesion that holds together the individual being, the witness that gives reality to the cosmos. (DaniÈlou 33)

If human beings were to truly realize that brahman and atman are the same, the machine would stop running. If the machine stopped running, the humans would perish. And if the humans perished the machine would perish. So it is in the world of The Matrix, so it is in our world veiled by Maya. It is no coincidence that the hero of the Matrix is named Neo, a not-so-subtle anagram for “one,” and that in the final installment of the trilogy, he merges with the machines to usher in a new and unpredictable age of human-machine/atman-brahman relations.

Like Cipher, most of us are currently the “kings” of our illusory worlds. Do we dare risk peeling back the protective layer of Maya, forfeit this reign, and perhaps reveal a reality that is even more unpleasant than the false one we see before us now? Or do we say “no thank you,” and continue to enjoy the bliss and xbox of our ignorance? Heinrich Zimmer says that the “aim of Indian thought has always been to learn the secret of the entanglement, and, if possible, to cut through into a reality outside and beneath the emotional and intellectual convolutions that enwrap the conscious being” (26). Perhaps then the Western attitude of “ignorance is bliss” is a good thing. For the rules of the game are that only a few of us can become “one” with the machine or else the whole system may crash.

So choose your pill wisely.

Works Cited

Burroughs, John. The Light of Day. New York: Houghton, 1900.

Campbell, Joseph. Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal. Ed. David Kudler. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003.

DaniÈlou, Alain. The Myths and Gods of India: The Classical Work on Hindu Polytheism. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1991.

The Matrix. The Wachowski Brothers, dir./scr. Warner Bros., 1999.

The Matrix Reloaded. The Wachowski Brothers, dir./scr. Warner Bros., 2003.

The Matrix Revolutions. The Wachowski Brothers, dir./scr. Warner Bros., 2003.

Plato. The Republic and Other Works. Trans. B. Jowett. New York: Anchor-Random House, 1973.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Trans. Jill Berman. Ed. David Berman. London: Everyman-J.M. Dent, 1995.

Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Ed. Joseph Campbell. Bollingen Series, 6. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

Posted by john at June 7, 2005 05:43 PM