Half-a-Hundred and counting
Posts: 63
Location: Korea
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I posted this elsewhere but thought it was of a different nature. The other explanations are physical, this is spiritual.
I have been thinking about the religious/mythological aspect of the sentinal flying through Neo's consciousnessl. Since there are at least 6 ways to watch and think about the movie(computer terms/christian/buddhist/mythological-archetypal/hindu/gnostic) I think the buddhist notion will help as well.
In the legend of Siddhartha becoming Buddha, there was a power he had aquired on his road to enlightenment. When he gave up the things of the world and went to sit under the bodhi tree (tree of enlightenment or just a fig tree in English) he was first tempted by Mara, the evil one, and then attacked. The purpose was to get a physical response from a person who was trying to give up all physical things. What is interesting to me that Siddhartha remained unmoved to these attacks, he was not distracted. Mara's demons lobbed deadly missles of uprooted trees, boiling mud, fiery rocks, live coals, and glowing ash at the future Buddha.
Now what happens next seems a lot like what the Bros. W. portrayed with the sentinal passing through Neo. The deadly missles lobbed by the demons had no effect upon Siddhartha for they entered his consciousness as sprays of flowers and caused no harm. Why, he had put all the things of the world behind that all that remained was the spiritual, which he had mastered as well.
Neo is the same, yet he has one distraction. Trinity. On the eight-fold path to enlightenment, an monk must give up all earthly attachments including vis-a-vis love. Only the ones who have an attachement to the love of humanity come back as bodhisattvas. Since Neo had a profound love for Trinity, he could not do what needed to be done. He had already given up his faith, he now thinks (or knows incorrectly) that he is not the one. He knows that religion as he knows it is dead. He has lost his earthly sight, and he will lose all his friends. It is not until Trinity's death that he lost the last vestige of his attachment to anything of this world. And he was ready to accept the ultimate truth, there is no beginning without an end. He can now say with the full confidence of an arahat, "I do not wish for death, I do not wish for life."
Back to the sentinal thing. It goes from physical to spiritual yet it doesn't pass through him idly as the blossoms did Buddha. It hurts him, we see him scream in pain, and then he looses all concentration and they must head to the clouds. The reason is again Trinity. He is the source of his greatest power, and the cause of his greatest weakness, he cannot reach his true potential with her. She must die, and does to the dismay of the non-Matrix fans.
On the Christian side. She dies, because she is the Trinity. Like God leaving Christ to die on the cross alone, for Christ must suffer alone in order to atone for mankind, Christ wails, "God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Neo feels the same way. He feels he cannot go on alone. And he must and does and completes what he must do.
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