More posts than teeth
Posts: 43
Location: Franklin, VA
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I think the question that has been posed should be changed from "Is Neo the One?" to "Is there really a One?" That's pretty much what everyone has been arguring, anyway. Any statements that pose someone ELSE as the One are just foolish. But the arguements that have started on the premise that there IS no One have quite a bit of merit. For instance:
Would those who have been called the Ones in the past have realized their potential without the Oracle's...meddling? She pretty much said it at their first meeting: "what's really going to bake your noodle later on is would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything." The ultimate in philosophical debates: what controls the future? Is it predestination? If so, then I was fated to write this post. It has nothing to do with choice, nothing to do with my own desires to write this rather than do homework/go to bed at 1:00 am. But I fI want to buck fate, and, say, punch a hole through my moniter, then that...well, that was fate, too. Although I think I'm making that decision, I really had no choice. The Oracle kind of refuted that with the whole vase thing.
So then we are in control of our own destinies, right? Absolutely wrong. If a gas main in my house explodes right now -- much to the celebration of some of the larger names on this site... -- I'm as dead as if I put a gun to my head. But I didn't choose to die, so what's going on?
Maybe I'll use a better example. A man breaks into my house, tries to steal stuff, sees me and shoots me. I didn't tell him to. I didn't put a sign outside my door saying "break in and kill me." It wasn't my choice; it was his. HE chose to break in. HE chose to carry a gun. HE chose to shoot me. And on the other side of the same token, I chose to be up at 1:00. I chose to forget about sleep. I made the decision to live in this particular house at this particular time. The gun-store owner decided to sell the gun. The drug dealer decided to give the man crack, starting him on a criminal path, leading him to buy the gun and use it to steal money so he could continue getting drugs, resulting in my death. I could continue...
On a religious note, God (or your own deity; I'm Christian, so I'm using the appelation God) knows your decisions. Not because it's predestined, but because He knows you. He knows you better than you know yourself, and so He understands how you will act and react in any and every given situation. Because of this understanding, He knows how I will react to your decisions, and how my sister will act once I make my own decisions.
The Oracle is similar. She knows...well, everything. She understands the code, she can read into decisions, she's great at making cookies, whatever the reason, she knows people. As she said to Neo in Reloaded no one can see past the decisions they don't understand. She understands not only her own decisions, but the decisions of everyone else, so she knows what will happen and how to make it happen. She made Neo break the vase. But how? He wasn't going to break it until she said something about it. So how could she have seen it? She understood Neo to the point that she knew if she were to say "Don't mind the vase." he would turn, and break it. She understood humanity to the point where she could say one minor thing to a person -- maybe the way she said "hello" or "good-bye" -- and ten years in the future, that person would act differently that he or she otherwise would have.
Wow, this is huge. I'm almost done.
So, now we get to the Ones. Would they have realized their potentials had the Oracle not brought it to their attentions? Who knows? It's a pretty tough situation to muddle through. But one thing we do know is that if the Oracle hadn't told Neo he wasn't the One and said the whole thing about Morpheus' capture, Neo might not have rescued him. If Neo and Trinity hadn't gone to the building, Neo would not have died like that. If Neo hadn't been shot in that particular situation, he might not have come to realize his full potential as the One.
Now you're dealing with the world of what might have been. It's quite the world to get stuck it; you might never find your way out. It's like trying to comprehend eternity. (I once wasted three hours trying to understand the word "always." Three hours later, I realized I had better things to do. Plus, I can better understand it after I die. Yay, Christian belief in the afterlife!) We just can't do it set up like we are. We understand the finite world. Things have a beginning and an end. No matter how far apart they are, as long as they exist like that, we can wrap our human minds around them. When you start analyzing every decision you make to see how it affected your current state of affairs, and try to understand EVERY decision you could ever possibly make, you get stuck. The best thing to do is learn from the past and plan for the future. I.E. skipping class last month was a bad idea, so I will go to class today instead of sleeping in.
Anyway, long story short, Neo was/is the One.
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