We cannot not play, we’re hard-wired to, but even so we don’t take its luminosity seriously. Play, we think, is just play—even when Jesus keeps telling us otherwise. Why? Because hard-wired though we may be to play, The Matrix’s got us counter-wired to dismiss it. We’ve gotta play, sure, The Matrix makes us think, but just as an escape from all the grown-up stuff it makes us believe we really gotta do.
What The Matrix has wired us to dismiss, you’ll remember, always pinpoints a vulnerability in its firewall. Because The Matrix no doubt suspects what Clarke uncannily intuits in Childhood’s End: between the time the kids evolve their über-mind-meld and the fierce moment of their inconceivable metamorphosis, for years, Clarke tells us, “very little” happens.
They have never moved in all that time, and take no notice of day or night, summer or winter. They are still testing their powers; some rivers have changed their courses, and there is one that flows uphill. But they have done nothing that seems to have any purpose.
Childhood’s End, p. 222; my emphasis.
Now link that up with what I said earlier, that in VALIS the divine mimics sci-fi in order to transform the benign escapism sci-fi offers into the very means of an escape of an entirely different order—namely, Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis. Link the two and ask yourself:
What if the powers we are still testing are our powers of spontaneous play: of imagination, of make-believe—our power, when The Matrix makes us believe one thing, to make-believe another.
And what if we have done nothing that seems to have any purpose because we’re still evolving the right story, the right scenario? VALIS, The Matrix, The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal, Childhood’s End, Star Wars, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Gospels—all our sacred texts, far from inerrant or infallible, are nothing but rough drafts for episodes of this blockbuster Netflix series full of dazzling twists we haven’t even imagined yet.
What if, as I’ve said, The Matrix—this conventional, consensual, so-called ‘reality’ we inhabit—isn’t evil at all. What if it, like Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka, has come forth from our own brain, and it shines vividly upon us in the form of—forget Netflix—the most awesomely immersive Glorious Great MMORPG* imaginable, so totally awesomely immersive, we’re so totally engaged that we’ve just totally forgotten we’re just totally making it up out of our own head.
*Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
What if in fact we are nothing but Über-Mind make-believing it’s playing the game from ten billion different points of view, pretending it’s ten billion different players for the sheer fun of seeing if it (we) can figure out what the heck’s going on, if it (we) can ever figure out how to piece itself (ourselves) back together.
Which means The Matrix—this conventional, consensual, so-called ‘reality’ we inhabit—is nothing but a dramatic device. It’s isn’t real. It’s just this ‘what-if’ we made up to use as the premise for a game that’s so totally wild-ass we haven’t even figured out yet (a) that, for starters, the first challenge is figuring out it IS but a game, for crying out loud, let alone (b) that what’s at stake isn’t even a Glorified Body like Jesus’s, which would be phenomenal enough, but a Glorified Mind, a superpower so inconceivably awesome it makes the Infinity Stones about as badass as a bag of marbles.
And not only is The Matrix not evil, it’s not using us, we’re not the battery for its endless computation. On the contrary, it’s dutifully powering Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis. Dutifully because every good story’s got to have a good villain. That’s its function. All the wrathful energy The Villainous Matrix expends constantly thwarting us and deluding us and entangling us in its deceptions, all the machinations of its devious and calculating logic are nothing more, nothing less than the exotic energy whence we draw our power, the very power we’re still testing, because once we’ve got it perfect we’re gonna use it to evolve the heck outta here.
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 