Hello and welcome to Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host, Thomas McConkey. Thanks so much for joining us this week.

So I want to talk this episode about The Matrix. The Matrix, some of you have seen this movie. It came out in

1999 and rocked the cinematic world with its metaphysical implications. I want to talk about a

scene really quickly from that movie and then relate it to mindfulness and relate it to our human life.

So there's this famous scene in the movie,

The Matrix, where Morpheus is sitting down with Neo

and he's describing the matrix to him,

this kind of false consciousness, this false reality. And he's saying, Morpheus is saying

to Neo, you feel the matrix when you go to work. You feel it when you go to church. You feel it

when you pay your taxes. In other words, it's everywhere. It's all about us, but we don't see it. We don't realize that we're in this matrix that is obscuring reality from us.

And so from that point, Neo, he offers, or pardon me, Morpheus offers Neo a red pill or a blue pill, the blue pill leading him

back to sleep back into the matrix where ignorance is bliss and the red pill, which will reveal

to Neo the true nature of reality. So this is an iconic moment in Hollywood.

But for me, as a mindfulness practitioner,

it actually points to a really profound truth and reality,

namely that all of us live in a matrix.

Now, I am not going down the road of saying that there is some nefarious alien race that is using

human beings as batteries to power their civilization.

That's where the movie takes us.

That's not where I'm going today.

It's much more cheery than that. But what I want to suggest to you is that

the matrix we live in as human beings is equally subtle. It's invisible to us if we don't have

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