You want to live? Life is truth. The rest is just looking for a quicker path to death. The living dead are all around us and they appear to be quite content.

Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save.… You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Life begins when the veil is parted.

“Now, my excellent friend,” said my companion, “you are in possession of all you need to follow my argument. We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.”

“Does that mean”, I said in some bewilderment, “that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?”

“Of course”, he said, “but that’s the final chapter in the history of the world.”

To which the translator adds:

I think therefore I am. The theme of Kleist’s essay could be a continuation of that famous sentence, a continuation which might go like this: I think, therefore I am aware of myself, and if I am aware of myself I must know that I am a separate entity, aware of and therefore apart from my surroundings; but true knowledge must be complete, connected, indivisible; so separation into subject and object, self and surroundings means distance from knowledge, consequently uncertainty and doubt.

Kleist’s essay pivots around a reference to the third chapter of the book of Genesis, the story of the Fall of Man, the discovery of that self-consciousness which establishes and perpetuates human isolation. But ‘discover’ implies a historical event. Kleist shares with Kafka (who once claimed he understood the Fall of Man better than anyone else) the insight that it is only our concept of time which makes us think of the Fall of Man as a historical event in the distant past. It is happening all the time. The biblical story is a mythical representation of constant human awareness of self and therefore of separation…

According to Kleist there is no way back. Humans are now thinking animals, and the material of thought is knowledge. But knowledge, although the source of uncertainty when fragmentary … is also the vital substance of harmony when complete. So Kleist asserts that our only hope is to go forward to total knowledge.“

IOW — we must take the red pill if we will have hope of regaining grace. Acting otherwise … acting as if some magic will intercede … is just willful ignorance and death.

I’m still digesting the stuff you posted. It’s rattling around in my head trying to find a place in my thinking.

Kullervo,

I agree. The truth is largely inaccessible to us. It’s a struggle to find what scraps of it we can, and even when we have some truth in hand, we’re never sure that it really is the truth. I don’t see the red pill/blue pill choice to be between truth and error. Perhaps my language here seems to say that, but I see it as a choice between the quest for truth and the quest for comfort.

Just because we choose to seek out truth doesn’t mean that we’re going to find it. The same holds for comfort. To continue to use the Matrix, Neo chose the red pill and awoke to a greater knowledge of reality, but there was still a lot that he didn’t know. His thinking was still clouded by false ideas that he didn’t want to give up. The trilogy showed his continued quest to find out the real truth, beyond false prophecies and delusions. The Oracle tells him that he wasn’t ready for the truth because he had chosen to avoid it: temet nosce, know thyself.

I don’t hope to ever come to the final truth of life, the universe, and everything. I look forward to striving for that goal.

Luke: “You told me Darth Vader betrayed and murdered my father.”
Ben: (Dead at this point of course) “Your father, Anakin, was seduced by the dark side of the Force-He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker, and became Darth Vader. When that happened, he betrayed everything that Anakin Skywalker believed in. The good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I told you was true…from a certain point of view.”
Luke: “A certain point of view!”
Ben: “Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.”

Although I’ll admit, some seem like all they are doing is trying to sell shoes.