Chapter A – The outer story; Post modernism from a kabalistic point of view

Why does the deepest truth reach us wrapped in an action movie?

"The role of the outer story is to encrypt the message, to wrap it in an attractive package, and so to get around our fear."

Sub-chapters: The role of the outer story and its advantages · Post-modernism through the lens of Kabbalah · Existentialism and chance versus providence, design and purpose · The problems and shortcomings of the outer story

This is the same video as the introduction on the home page, together with the first chapter – the outer story.

The role of the outer story and its advantages

The goal: the purpose of the film, as mentioned above, is to teach us about the true nature of man and his world.

The problem: we are captives inside a worldview. Our matrix grips our minds and does not let us see, understand or learn.

The solution: the role of the outer story is to encrypt the message, to wrap it in an attractive package, and so to get around our fear.

At its core, the outer story speaks of a war – a war waged between man and the consciousness he himself created. The very consciousness that was supposed to help him master the world and reality suddenly rose up and spread its net of control over him, in the spirit of "the golem rose up against its creator." This war is a parable, a metaphor, for two kinds of war being fought on different levels of our world: a war on the physical level and a war on the spiritual level.

• On the physical level we are witnessing a highly advanced, world-embracing reincarnation of the industrial revolution, in the modern format of computers and high-tech. Over the entire world is spread a vast economic network made of giant corporations, steering everything that happens in the world – politics, culture, education and so on – according to a single guideline: money, money and more money. Today this is called globalization. Who stands at its head? It does, itself. The whole of humanity has become the slave of the worldwide network of corporations. On this level, for the simple observer, the film is one more layer in the struggle of the "green" organizations against the takeover of humanity by global corporations. We understand that there is more…
• On the spiritual, mental level we are witnessing another phenomenon. The "new" man created a worldview that took control of him and locked him in a spiritual, mental prison – a prison that hides from his eyes reality as it is in itself, the true reality, the reality beyond: meta-physical reality (beyond the physical). He lives inside a bubble of a man-made world, an absolute world fenced in by cold mathematical and scientific law. It is an artificial world whose base is an enormous culture of consumption of products that are imitations of life – glittering wrappings with emptiness and barren stimulation behind them. A world of "as if." A world in which the point of reference for all things is man himself. This is the world… and that's it! This is me, and that's it!

Here the genius of the outer story comes to light.

The outer story is meant to bring meta-physical reality into the physical world, the world of man. It is indeed a paradox, but it is the secret of the film's astonishing success. There lies its main strength, and there too lies the root of its weakness. Further on we will look at the source of modern man's great fear of acknowledging a reality beyond the physical, beyond himself. What the Wachowski brothers did was to bypass this fear by representing, in the film, the whole higher spiritual (metaphysical) reality that lies beyond man and the world as computer programs which, according to the script, are the product of man's own hands – AI (Artificial Intelligence). A candy we are not afraid to eat. In the film it is man who "gave birth" to the AI, which represents for us the spiritual worlds, and it is the AI that "created" the Matrix, which is a parable for our world. (Matter = Matrix: the digital fabric of the material world in which we live.)

Through this parable we suddenly understand that the world we live in is really an illusion – or, in modern language, a virtual world – and that there is a reality beyond this world. Touching the reality beyond opens the possibility of meaning. This is the main message of the film: the passage from an absolute physical world, whose point of reference is limited, physical man, to a world of possibility, whose point of reference is spiritual, beyond the world, infinite and hidden.

The Malbim described this war in his poetic language: the Greeks, who were occupied with understanding the laws of this world, were overtaken by the "lens" (the outlook) of necessity – that the world is necessary in its existence – whereas the world is in truth possible in its existence. Or, in our own words: nothing stands in the way of the will. The will can rise above all laws.

Post-modernism through the lens of Kabbalah

In this sub-chapter we will try, from two angles – general world philosophy and Judaism – to understand the era in which we live today, the path by which we arrived here, and the potential hidden in it as reflected in the film.

If we trace the development of human consciousness since the creation of the world and compare it to the development of the soul of a single person, we discover surprising similarities. It seems that, like the process of maturing from child to adult, which passes through the stage called adolescence, humanity as a whole – and we within it – is now emerging from the great teenage rebellion of the human race.

Until the appearance of Greek rationalism, humanity as a whole lived in active awareness of the spiritual world surrounding it. Almost all peoples recognized that complete reality extends beyond the limits of the body and of the material world we live in, and that our lives here should be directed by their spiritual purpose. With the development of the investigating intellect, man suddenly grasped that he could "understand" reality, and that with this understanding he could control it. Man began to strip the phenomena of the world of their spiritual and emotional charge and to explain them through cold, lifeless mathematical formulas. Science gave man, at one and the same time, a tool for controlling the world and the feeling that he no longer needs anyone – he is autonomous, he stands on his own. He defines himself as he learned to define the world; he is his own sovereign. Sounds familiar? Not by chance. This is the basic line of thought of the "new age" – the global teenage rebellion.

The main "guides" of this era – Spinoza, Kant, Descartes, Nietzsche – led the revolution: no more abstract metaphysical explanations; we will discover objectively what the world is and what man is, with the intellect as the guideline. Man is the point of reference, the "I" is the center – the "Copernican revolution." According to their approach, it was even man who created (out of his own need) the concept of God and of the world beyond – he created God! Just as man thought he "understood" the world, so he thought he would also find objective values – true morality. This assumption allowed him to throw into the trash all the earlier spiritual and religious beliefs, which in his view were nothing but primitive explanations of the nature of the world. Man threw Father out of the house. He believed that with the help of objective science he would discover his essence and his purpose; he would discover meaning. Man still believed that meaning exists – only that, just as he still lacked the tools to understand the world completely, so he lacked only the tools to understand meaning absolutely.

But what happened in the end?

There was a crisis!

Suddenly cracks began to appear in man's autonomy (post-modernism): the weakening of the purely human world. In the scientific arena more and more signs appeared, hinting ever more forcefully that man has no tools to understand reality. Not only does he not have the tools now – he never will. The limitation is not technical but essential! Theories appeared that spoke of relativity, uncertainty, complementarity, anti-matter; no more matter, everything is forms of energy, force fields, negative time, a particle that is a wave, matter that is energy, the freedom of particles, quanta, observation that changes the results, and so on – concepts that point to a limitation of perception. The very methods of research were found wanting. Man began to grasp that the finite tools of the material world are good only on the level of the nearby bubble in which he lives, but are not enough to understand the whole. He began to come down from his original dream of understanding essence and purpose. But instead of understanding that he was simply not using the right tools, he made the fatal mistake of deciding that if science cannot discover it, then apparently there is no single meaning, no purpose, no truth! From here the road leads to total nihilism – each person with his own truth. (A hint to this is the book from which Neo takes out the disk for Choi: Simulacra and Simulation, a book that speaks about nihilism in the post-modern era.) We don't know, so we don't impose. Despair of knowing. Tolerance as a cover for lack of content and for emptiness. Existentialism – the world of chance, accident and error.

This is our prison; this is the consciousness, the AI – the perception that man created and that took control of him. This is the world of concealment (olam – he'elem) into which man brought himself, and out of which he must climb.

To sum up: on the one hand, man found himself, with the help of science, ruling with a high hand over the near world around him – a king. On the other hand, that same science "revealed" to him that he is no more than a chance occurrence, stardust on an obscure galaxy moving meaninglessly from nowhere to nowhere, without purpose, without aim and without meaning – an accident or an evolutionary error. On the outside he is a king; on the inside, an abysmal emptiness and spiritual decay. Into this dichotomy of the post-modern age enters the Matrix, which is meant to give back to man, sunk in the astonishing electronic toys of the end of the 20th century, the tools to break out of his physical world – to touch the point of the "beyond" and thereby find meaning, purpose and destiny.

This is the role of the children of Shem (Noah's son). The name Shem has two meanings: name, and there. The first meaning is "there" and not here. There is this near world, and there is what is "there" – beyond, outside the limits of this world. Our Sages tell us that Shamayim (heaven) is "sham" (there) twice, and that the heavens were created first. They represent the purpose, the goal. The earth is called eretz, from the word ratzon (will) and ritza (running) – a lack, a need that causes movement toward the purpose, toward the goal. "Shem" in the sense of name means the essence – the purpose of a thing, beyond its physical composition, beyond its body. (As is demonstrated in the film by the name NEO, which, when its letters are rearranged, gives its purpose – ONE.) Here on earth we will never find the purpose, the meaning – because it is there, beyond, in heaven. Science, which tried to find it with earthly tools, failed, and so man decided to find earthly substitutes for meaning and for the true essence – the essence beyond, the spiritual essence. The problem is that true pleasure and happiness always come from fulfilling one's destiny, from realizing one's purpose; therefore the earthly substitutes do not bring the longed-for happiness, which comes only when a person fulfills his original destiny, when he connects to the "sham." Until then, despite fulfilling his earthly desires, he simply feels empty – "and the soul is not filled."

Man was given a double task. On the one hand, "subdue it and rule over it" – to conquer and rule the world; and on the other hand, "to work it and to guard it" – to keep the world as a vessel for spiritual work and for fulfilling the destiny, realizing the purpose given to him by the One who sent him. Man in the "new age," drunk with admiration for his own power and ability to control, forgot the "to guard it." He forgot his task, and so he began to destroy the world. This is the world of Japheth (Noah's other son, the father of Greece), the father of the Western world, which is only half the picture – the half of control. The final goal is a balance between the ability to control and the recognition of the mission and of the One who sends, and acceptance of His authority: independence versus servitude, freedom versus destiny.

Wholeness is always a living connection between opposites, and the whole person is the one who can contain the opposites within himself. "And Japheth shall dwell in the tents of Shem."

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Existentialism and chance versus providence, design and purpose

Throughout the entire film we witness a war of worldviews between Morpheus and Neo on one side, and Smith and the other representatives of the "system" on the other. The essence of the Matrix is a virtual (imaginary) world in which the minds of people, asleep in an illusion of reality, "live." The aim of the "system" and its agents is that the minds of the people "playing" inside that imaginary world should not wake up from it. Their task is therefore to persuade them that "this is all there is," and that any talk of a reality beyond, of purpose and destiny, is barren and foolish. This is the system's first line of defense. (Later we will become acquainted with further lines of defense, meant for those "exceptions" who do not "buy" the bluff and do not fall in line with the system, because something drives them to search, to wake up anyway. To them the "system" sells, inside the Matrix, blue pills in the form of various workshops and spiritual methods that do speak of liberation, but whose real role is only to quiet the conscience that burns for freedom, to divert them from the path of the fighters of Zion, and to keep them inside the illusion.)

Smith's role – from the time he is an agent of the system until he rises to the position of Neo's negative mirror – is to convince Neo that his struggle is useless. In his words: "Hope, truth, love, choice – they are the inventions of a feeble human mind trying to justify an existence without meaning or purpose; illusions as artificial as the Matrix itself." This is just what we learned above: humanity, in its disappointment at failing to understand true reality and meaning, decided arbitrarily that there is none, and that man's tireless search for it stems from his failure to accept its absence. The world was not created by design, and so it is devoid of any plan, destiny or goal. The world simply happened – a kind of involuntary accident. Smith's voice is the voice of existentialism, the outlook held in the minds of most of the "enlightened" world in our time. At its base lies the assumption we have already understood – despair of finding a goal. There is no truth, no meaning, no purpose; let each person decide for himself what the purpose is. Or even, following J.P. Sartre: the purpose is to be able to live without purpose, without meaning. Freedom and tolerance that are a disguise for a universal human breakdown of values. We don't know what is right, so let each one do what he thinks and try not to harm his fellow's similar right. A tolerance that gives indirect approval and legitimacy to invalid and destructive views within the framework of individual freedom, freedom of expression and all sorts of other freedoms, whose true essence is a terrible slavery to the world of illusion – to the Matrix, to the world of matter and bodily lusts (Cypher).

Opposite them we see Zion and its fighters, who see themselves as being on a mission – a mission to the truth. From their understanding that the world is programmed, designed by a consciousness found beyond the reality we know, they understand that if there is a plan, then there is a goal, there is a purpose. The task of "the One," and of each and every one, is to understand his role – the reason he is here, his place within the general plan. Morpheus, in his speech before the operation, teaches his companions that there is no such thing as an accident or chance – there is providence, purpose, destiny. Everything has meaning – every detail, every moment. There is a plan! Their war is, first and foremost, to recognize the mission. Later the war turns into resistance and confrontation with the agents of the system, who try to put them and the rest of humanity to sleep. True freedom is freedom from slavery to the Matrix – a freedom that involves devotion, sacrifice and commitment to the truth, to the path of the fighters of Zion.

The problems and shortcomings of the outer story

At the opening of this chapter we described the role of the film in conveying the message that there is a reality outside the bubble in which we live. We spoke a little about the difficulty of presenting "worlds beyond" to a person who lives inside this bubble of his physical world and who is flooded by the "incitement" of the system's agents, who build a firewall around him in order to keep him "hooked" on the Matrix forever. So the creators of the story represented these spiritual worlds as AI, which is a human creation, to make it easy for us to accept. With this parallel it is indeed easier for us to "swallow" the plot and its encrypted messages – but of course a distortion is created that does not fit the true reality.

• In the film, the Matrix was created by the AI as a mechanism for controlling humanity – a goal that is fundamentally negative, part of a war between the machines and humanity. The true reality of the world is indeed an illusion – a world of falsehood, "alma de-shikra" – but its purpose is positive. The world is really a platform for training. A training program (like the one Neo goes through) in which, inside a world of opposites and falsehood, a person has to find wholeness and truth. A training course for building the soul, whose purpose is good: to bring the person close to the Programmer – a closeness whose end is connection and unity.
• In the film, the awakening causes the soul to leave the imaginary world, and its training takes place outside. In our reality, both the awakening and the training take place here, inside the world. Of course in the film the war is very physical and violent, since viewers all over the world can relate to activity of this kind; the real war, however, is far more inner and subtle, and it concerns the forms of perception and thought that come to expression in behavior (see the chapter on the work of character traits).
• Since reality outside the Matrix also has to be human, for the reasons we discussed, a strange situation is created: the world of truth outside the illusion – which should be clean and pure, a world reserved for those who have refined themselves from materialism and earthliness – appears in the film not so different from the Matrix itself. Beyond the basic distortion that comes from the reason mentioned above, the creators apparently gave in at this point to further Hollywood production needs, and greatly exaggerated it in their description of the "immodest" way of life in Zion.

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To continue to the next chapter – Chapter B, "The liberation", click here >>

Translated from the Hebrew chapter "ספור המעטפת – פוסט מודרניזם קבלי" by Roni Ayalon-Hirsch.