HOW TO GET OUT OF THE MATRIX,

ACCORDING TO PHILIP K. DICK

MAGIC AND METAPHYSICS

BY: ALEJANDRO MARTÍNEZ GALLARDO - 08/03/2017

THIS IS THE RECIPE TO ESCAPE THE MATRIX AND

ACHIEVE THE STATE OF A CHRIST OR A BUDDHA,
ACCORDING TO PHILIP K. DICK
Philip K. Dick said in a lecture in 1977 : "We live in a computationally
programmed reality and the only clue we have is when a variable is
changed and an alteration in our reality occurs." His ideas undoubtedly
prefigure the notion developed in The Matrix trilogy. A series that, as
Professor Robert Thurman has noted, has notable Buddhist influences
(the Matrix of Buddhism is called samsara) and that has produced the
great metaphor of our time to refer to an ancient sensation: the
suspicion that the world we experience conventionally it is an illusion.
In his labyrinthine and obsessive reflection on a series of mystical
visions that occurred on 3/2/1974, captured in The Exegesis , curiously
Dick, a Christian Gnostic, gives the path as a possible escape from this
illusory maze that today we call The Matrix. of the bodhisattva. Dick
tells about the protagonist of a text that he planned to call The Owl :

He only truly escapes the labyrinth when he decides to voluntarily

return (resubmit himself to the power of the labyrinth) to benefit
those still trapped within it. That is, you can never leave alone, to
leave you must choose to take others... this is the ultimate
paradox of the labyrinth, the quintessential naivety of its
construction, that the only way out is a voluntary way back (to the
inner power), which is what constitutes the path of the
bodhisattva.

Dick reinforces this same idea: "If happiness exists, it must arise from
voluntarily surrendering one's being in exchange to consciously
participate in the destiny of total unity." In other words, the hero of the
Matrix, the bodhisattva, the hacker, is the one who discovers that the
reality beyond the illusion of the program or simulacrum is complete
interdependence between all beings, which is the indestructible seed
of compassion. . The motivation for compassion, renunciation and
surrender in favor of others is the wisdom that others are part of me; If
the entire universe is the experience of a single body or mandala, then
compassion arises as spontaneously as when one removes one's
fingers from the fire (that fire is samsara, it is the Matrix). In Tantric
Buddhism, compassion is the unsurpassed method ( upaya ) to
achieve enlightenment and awaken from the dream of samsara.

This interstice or divine glitch in the architecture of the Matrix or the

labyrinth (this thread of Ariadne), which Dick discovers as compassion,
is precisely what unites Buddhism and Christianity. Also in The
Exegesis, Dick writes: "Christ is Buddha approved as a bodhisattava."
The Christ act is an act of pure compassion: sacrificing your life to
save others; It coincides with the bodhisattva oath: to dedicate
countless lives to liberate all beings, to remain within samsara until all
beings achieve liberation. Continuing this Gnostic foray into Mahayana
Buddhism, Dick writes that "the highest quality of compassion is the
only power capable of solving the labyrinth... The true measure of man
is not his intelligence or his success in this insane system. No, the true
measure of man is this: how quickly he can respond to the need of
others and how much of himself he can give." Here there is a clear
biblical echo, only he who is capable of giving his life (this worldly life,
this dust) will be able to obtain eternal life, but it will no longer be
someone, an individual, but will be divinity itself: Christ, Buddha... The
death of our separate personality, of our ego, is the seed of the life of
the spirit. But that life of the spirit, more than a new phase, is the
original condition that has always existed, innate and therefore
immortal. With this we also arrive at another of the essential concepts
of the theology of Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer who was
actually one of the great mystics of the 20th century. Taking from Plato
but also in communion with the tantric path of Vajrayana Buddhism,
Dick maintains that the remedy to heal this condition of being lost in
the labyrinth (in samsara) is anamnesis, the loss of the amnesia that
characterizes us. "You remembered your origins, and they were from
beyond the stars." In Tantric Buddhism, the original condition, the
notion of primordial purity, the inherent Buddha nature (or
tathagatagarbha) , is assumed as the present reality, thus the base of
the path becomes indivisible from the fruit (the project of becoming
buddhas is nourished by the vision that we are already buddhas). In
other words, one brings to mind, one remembers ( mindfulness , sati )
one's own Buddha nature, the light of origin (beyond the stars and
beyond the human). Likewise, the fact that exiting the labyrinth
constitutes precisely remaining in it from the perspective of
compassion already intuits a notion that is not fully developed in Dick's
vision (and that perhaps conflicts with the dualism of Christian
Gnosticism). , that is, non-duality. In the deepest sense, when the
change of perspective of compassion and the integration of the whole
in one has been made, the labyrinth is no longer a labyrinth (it is a
space without limits), there is no separation between outside and
inside, the Samsara is nirvana, but, mystical traditions tell us, it is only
understood and experienced by someone who has achieved a state
like that of a christ, a bodhisattva, a tzaddikim, etc.

In the film The Matrix: Revolutions , the climax of the saga occurs with
a confrontation between Agent Smith and Neo. Neo manages to
conquer the last obstacle, thus fully recognizing his own Buddha
nature as "The One", before becoming his enemy, absorbing Smith
into himself. Upon accomplishing this, the Matrix explodes into the
emptiness it always was, just radiant emptiness. For Mahayana
Buddhism, emptiness necessarily implies compassion and vice versa
(this extension of Neo in Smith is a recognition of the emptiness of
identity and a compassion, a feeling-with). Things are empty since they
have no inherent existence, they do not exist from their own side but
only in interdependence with all other things; Compassion arises
spontaneously from recognizing this interdependence, we could even
say that compassion is that same interdependence : the reflex act that
arises spontaneously from knowing that in each thing all other things
are reflected (as in the case of Indra's mythical pearl necklace). , one
of the most beautiful metaphors of the nature of the universe).

Says Dick: "We are forgetful cosmocrators , trapped in the universe of

our own making." It is the ignorance that this world is generated by our
own mind that perpetuates the state of suffering, that continues to
reproduce a dream. We suffer and feel pain because we believe that
the dream is real and that we are separated from others, but that same
suffering is what motivates us to act, discover the truth and wake up.
"In a very real sense, the pain we feel as living creatures is the pain of
awakening... the pressure of this pain motivates us to seek answers or,
in other words, it motivates us to greater awareness." This is exactly
the understanding of the Buddha's first noble truth.