The Matrix Decoded

Chapter 10 - Slimy Rebirth

DVD Script
(fairly close, anyway)

Notes

We are now in the Power Plant...Neo awakens and struggles to free himself, to be born out of the womb that enslaves him.

He breaks free of the membrane surrounding him and takes his first breath of air.

Neo looks around at his surroundings and sees thousands upon thousands of pods with people in them. For the first time, he sees the world for what it is, yet he does not understand it.

The word for 'breath' in Hebrew is the same as the word for 'spirit.' In Genesis, when God breathed life into Adam, He also breathed Spirit into him. Here, Neo has his first breath of air and, perhaps, his first breath of Spirit.

Dream theology often considers birth to represent the waking of the ego, the consciouness.

A machine, the DoctorBot, drops down in front of him, inspects him and finds him unworthy of life, or at least dying. The 'plug' in the back of his skull is removed, severing his connection with the software that is the world he knew.

The tubes that are connected to his body snap away, painfully. These have been his nutrition and also have drained him of the energy his body produced.

Neo seems himself truly for the first time in the reflection on the DoctorBot. "Unless a person is born from above, he cannot see," and he also "cannot enter the kingdom of God." (John 3:3,5).

We, too must learn to see the world around us for what it is. The ads that tell us we 'need' or 'deserve' an X-box, the desire we feel to 'fit in' to our peer group and the pressure put on us to conform to the morals of our society are all ways that we are blinded from the truth; that God is in control and knows what is best for us and that His truth is the only way for us to be truly free.

Neo is beginning to become an image of 'The One.' "So all of us, with faces unveiled, see as in a mirror the glory of the Lord; and we are being changed into His very image..." (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Neo is flushed into a sewer system, like the waste that the Matrix finds him to be.

Yeshua was similarly 'disposed of' when He was beaten and crucified. The world could not accept Him and was not willing to let go of their own lives and destiny and so He was removed from it. ("I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world," John 17:14.)

Of course, he conquered death and rose again, so we could be saved!

Plunging into the water, Neo is cleansed from the gelatin that covered his body. A mechanical arm plunges into the water and recovers him, bringing him out of the water and up into the belly of the Neb.

MORPHEUS: Welcome to the real world.

Here, Neo is baptized. He is cleansed of the muck that he is covered with, the muck that comes from living in the world. Notice that he goes under 3 times, just as we are baptized 'into the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.'

We, too, must be cleansed. While we considered that cleansing to come from the blood of the Lamb, (Yeshua) the first command that He gives us is to be baptized, or ritually cleansed. It is easier for our minds to accept that there is a change if we do something physical to celebrate it. I believe this is one of the reasons that He tells us to be baptized.

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