If you would like to think of meditation practice as being a rebellion against an oppressive overlord, there’s a way to do that: just think of yourself as fighting your creator, natural selection. Kind of disappointing.īut there’s good news on this front.

Mara, though, has no place in the more secular Buddhism that has been spreading through the west in recent years. In traditional Buddhism, actually, there is: the Satan-like supernatural being named Mara, who unsuccessfully tempted the Buddha during the epic meditation session that led to his great awakening. Too bad that in Buddhism there’s no evil perpetrator of delusion to fight! That would come in handy with the Buddhist struggle against illusion, because meditation, a big part of that struggle, can be hard to sustain-getting on the cushion every day, even when you don’t feel like it, and then carrying the insights from meditation into everyday life. They give him something to rebel against-and rebellions are energizing! An oppressive enemy focuses the mind and steels you for the struggle ahead. That robot overlords are behind the illusion afflicting Neo is in one sense a blessing. Until you “see it for yourself,” as one character explains to Neo, you will remain in “bondage.” The Matrix is sometimes said to be a “dharma movie” because it allegorically captures the human predicament as Buddhism depicts it: Life as ordinarily lived is a kind of illusion, and you can’t be truly free until you pierce the illusion and look into the heart of things. These people have been put in their pods by robot overlords and given dream lives as pacifiers.

He’s having that hallucination while, unbeknownst to him, his actual physical body is inside a gooey, coffin-size pod, one among many pods, rows and rows of pods, each pod containing a human being absorbed in a dream.

The life he thought he was living is actually an elaborate hallucination. To learn more and sign up, visit .Īt the risk of overdramatizing the human condition: Have you ever seen the movie The Matrix? It’s about a guy named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), who discovers that he’s been inhabiting a dream world. This spring, Robert Wright teaches Beyond Tribalism: How Mindfulness Can Save the World , a six-week Tricycle Online Course about the psychology of tribalism and the ancient Buddhist tools that can make us happier and less reactive.

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