The world isn’t really all you think it is. Morpheus was right, don’t you know. Or, as Yoda put it, you must unlearn what you have learned….and what you have learned is that the world is precisely what you can see or perceive with your senses.
When Morpheus was trying to convince Neo that he needed to be willing to expand his mind to consider the possibility, the message was both an appeal to be a good critical thinker and an appeal the supernatural. Let’s take them both in turn.
At Valencia, we join thousands of other professors in attempting to teach and model critical thinking. It’s a concept in vogue, and like many ideas from academia, it’s easy to miss and misuse. Typically there isn’t any simple definition, and thus on the whole, it gets ill defined. Or worse, it’s never defined, but professors and teachers toss it around in the vain hope that saying it enough times may do some good.
I won’t take the space here to attempt to drill down into a definition. This organization does a solid enough job if you want more info. For our purposes here, though, the aspect to focus on is the idea that a critical thinker is broad-minded enough to allow for multiple possibilities as an answer to an issue or question. Or, to say it aimed at the thinker, a critical thinker holds her own opinions loosely; loose enough to listen to the “other.”
If there were one thing I could magically insert into our country, this would be it. The ability to listen patiently, to consider multiple possibilities is a true mark of a critical thinker. Even deeper, a real deep thinker understands that they might be wrong. Most often, the person in discussion is so locked in on his or her own opinion, in a spirited defense of a fact or opinion to which they have now already invested enough energy that they refuse to back down, that at this point, there really is no discussion to be had. Oh, they’ll talk a lot, and they’ll give lip service to hearing, but really their mind is already made up.
So, in that vein, someone like Neo, if unwilling to be a critical thinker, to be curious, to be willing to entertain, would have just let his brief encounter with Trinity slide on by. Obviously, since he took the red pill, we know he was willing to at least consider.
But there’s more, right? Morpheus was tapping into something deeper than just an event in the mind, and here’s where we really need to go if we hope to really understand what’s wrong with the world today.
The premise of the Bible suggests that this world is not really the full world, or perhaps better stated, while the earth is here, this world is surrounded by a deeper, more real world. Various accounts explain this, perhaps none so famously as when the holy man prayed for his companion to be given true sight so that he could see the legions of angels surrounding them to protect them (II Kings 6:14-17).
It’s more, though, than just the idea that angels surround us, though that is a very powerful thought. But, consider further that on the whole, ideas like honesty or community are things beyond what seems currently real. This is where the Enlightenment and the Romanticism struggle in opposition. For the Enlightenment, particularly connected to the Scientific Revolution, the only things that were real must be things held tightly in the left hemisphere of the brain.
The Romantic movement of the 19th century attempted, though I would argue failed, to wrest back part of the mystery of life. To suggest that not everything could be measured with algorithms or formulas. Perhaps had the world not drifted to the cataclysm of the world wars in the early 20th century, we might have seen a greater willingness to accept that there would always be more than the human mind could comprehend.
Now as we finally move into the second decade of the new millennium, deeply ensconced in post-modernism, there is perhaps a chance that Morpheus’ call to Neo can resonate in our own ears.
There is a world beyond just what you can see with your eyes. Things like friendship and love are just two examples that you can’t truly measure, but have a worth far beyond anything you can create in a factory, beyond anything that is easy to measure with a metric.
Take the red pill. Open your eyes by releasing the right hemisphere of your brain. Embrace your intuition. Drink deep from the fountain of faith and allow room for the impossible. This can be the very moment you finally arise to your greatest success.