I watched The Matrix again last week for the first time in quite a few years. Being aware of the allusions that it was making to literature, mainly Alice, was quite entertaining as there is one every two seconds. Most obviously, Neo follows the white rabbit, Morpheus says the red pill will let him see just how far the rabbit hole goes, the portal into the ‘real’ world, and on and on and on.
I was trying to think of the Matrix in terms of the collective unconscious. If you say that the Matrix itself represents a collective unconscious than it seems that it has been caged. A forced conformity. However, one of the agents says something to Morpheus that is interesting. As he explains how the Matrix got started, he says that the first versions of the Matrix were designed so that everyone would be happy – there would be no pain. The problem was that people kept waking up – their minds didn’t like a world without pain. So I was wondering what that says about the human condition. If the collective unconscious needs, for some reason, pain and experience. This sounds an awful lot like childhood vs. adulthood.
Does the collective unconscious force us into experience?
curiouser and curiouser.
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