The Matrix franchise has been in the spotlight for the past few months due to the release of the fourth installment “The Matrix: Resurrections”. The discussions I see online have reminded me how misunderstood the sequels are. It’s no secret that I love the franchise. It’s absolutely packed with symbolism and cool ideas that over the years keep impressing me with how bold and ambitious they are. In this post, I will focus on one of the key concepts that makes its appearance in the third film: the golden light.

As a quick refresher, starting from the end of the second film, we can see that Neo is able to “feel” the sentinels and even shut them down at will. He is also destroying sentinels en masse on his way to the machine city while Trinity is driving, even though he can’t even see them. People have argued that he has somehow gained access to a kind of wireless connection to the machines through his interaction with the source in the second film. I don’t think this holds up as an explanation because in the third film, he is blinded by Bane (who is possessed by Smith) and we can clearly see that he is able to see Smith in the form of golden light inside Bane’s flesh even though he’s blind. There are no mechanical parts in Bane (well, except for the holes I suppose), his consciousness has just been altered by Smith. Furthermore, he can perceive the entire machine city as formations of golden light. Whatever effect the source had on Neo seems to transcend ordinary electronic circuits.

Below I will provide a more philosophical (and speculative) account of what the golden light is and how it connects to Neo’s abilities based on material that has been released either with the movies or after them. If you expect a strictly mechanistic explanation of everything you will probably be disappointed. This is more of a loose attempt at putting things together and as such, we probably need to tone down the scientist in us a little bit. There are certain interpretative jumps that need to be taken which (in my view) are quite consistent with information that is presented in the movies and other media from the Wachowskis themselves.

So… let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way. Apart from pure curiosity, what makes the golden light worth discussing? From the philosopher’s commentary with Dr. Cornel West and Ken Wilber as well as the comments by Lana Wachowski in a discussion between Lana and Ken Wilber, it becomes clear that the gold light that Neo perceives in the city of Machines has major conceptual significance for the trilogy.

Ken Wilber: As you know, I think it’s incredibly gutsy because the whole key to the Matrix trilogy—this is my interpretation—is given in really in the last fifteen, twenty minutes of the third film; that the Rosetta Stone is when Neo, for example, is saying of the machines, “If you could only see them like I see em…they’re all light. They’re made of light”

This is just Ken Wilber’s interpretation though. However, he does point out that he has “corroborated” his interpretation with the Wachowskis to some extent. Here’s what Lana had to say in an interview

If you basically work on what the trilogy is all about, you come to this symbol that is never discussed… and yet it’s there clearly. The third movie actually begins with the gold light as a part of the opening title montage. As if to say that…look, this is an essential element. It’s as important as the matrix code is.

My central claim in this post is that the golden light is meant to symbolize spirit . I will do my best to explain what that means and why this view makes sense. Additionally, I’ll provide you with sources that support this claim and I’ll briefly go over them to describe what each source suggests.

Opening Sequence

The golden light appears in the opening sequence of the Matrix Revolutions. In the youtube video I linked, Lana explains that the opening sequence tries to provide a visual “summary” of what the film is about. You can watch the sequence on this link.

The sequence begins with an explosion of golden light symbolizing the Big Bang, and an emergence of fractal patterns which are most likely a rendering of a Julia set. As the camera keeps zooming inside the fractals, it eventually reaches a depiction of the machine city. Fractals exhibit self-similarity and (roughly speaking) are produced by an iterative process that converges for certain points and diverges for others. Fractals are rather generic entities that have been used in all sorts of metaphors so by themselves they’re not enough to draw any solid conclusion. Following the fractals we zoom out to matrix code and a panoramic view of the matrix Megacity which looks like a symbol. So the Matrix and the Megacity appear to be layered on top of the golden light in this sequence.

Given Lana’s comments and that the golden light is shown to underlie the matrix and the Megacity, it is fair to assume at this point that it’s a fundamental layer of the story, and given the Big Bang depiction, of reality as presented in the matrix. How do we know it’s supposed to be the Big Bang and not some flashy random explosion? Well, here’s the quote from Lana in the discussion with Ken Wilber:

That was the… in the beginning of the third movie when there’s like… we’re like: “How do we start the third movie? Which is gonna talk about the things that are so hard to talk about?” It’s like: Ok, you go to black and then you have to have a moment of Big Bang and that’s the origin of everything, the origin of thought, the origin of consciousness, whatever it is—in that moment it’s like ‘from that nothing to everything’ is everything… [Ken laughs]

Given the title of the movie and the emphasis of the franchise on repeated patterns (for example the cycle of Zion being “rebooted” by the machines through the One), it can be fair to connect the fractal to the concept of “Revolutions”, in the sense of repeating processes that revolve around a certain point. The fractals can be viewed as a loose visual metaphor for said revolutions. Furthermore, the self-similarity may be viewed as reflecting the different layers of the story that share similar characteristics. For example, the power struggle between Neo and Smith in the Matrix can be seen to reflect the larger struggle of humans and machines. The underlying fabric of those cycles and power struggles is the golden light, i.e., spirit. But what does that even mean? This is still all very vague, so let’s get into it.

To explain in more detail we will need to introduce some key concepts that will be essential to understanding those connections.

Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher and I have read about those things only in online lecture material, blog posts, and online encyclopedias. I’m sure there will be people that find this too crude, misguided, or even outright incorrect. If there are points in this post where what I’m saying is blatantly wrong, feel free to shoot me an email to let me know :)

What I’m presenting here is just my reading of the material and more particularly, how I am guessing that the Wachowskis may have understood and interpreted this material to connect it to the Matrix. Of course, I don’t know them and I’ve never talked to them so that’s just me piecing things together in a way that hopefully makes sense.

Spirit

So, what is spirit? There are multiple accounts of what constitutes spirit. One of the most widely discussed realizations of the concept comes from the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel . In the article by Rex Martin “The World Spirit” we read:

The main speculative claim of Hegelian philosophy is that the totality of human history is a single whole and the work of one Spirit (a World Spirit or World-Historical Spirit), i.e., of human activity taken en bloc, as a single collectivity. The entire history of the world is to be viewed as a single “life”, as the career of one self or person. World History is a self-organizing process. What happens in World History is the progressive actualization of the only truly individual person or self (the World Spirit).

So, the bottom line is that the history of the world is meant to be viewed as the journey of self-actualization of spirit. To a non-philosopher like myself this sounds like a borderline religious claim, but there’s more. Spirit is meant to be perceived almost as a different state of matter. It is not localized in individuals, minds, or objects. It is meant to inhabit another realm where the “collective-consciousness” of an entire society resides. In some sense, you can view spirit as encoding fundamental progress towards a greater self-awareness (often referred to as “self-consciousness”) of the universe.

Here’s another quote from Lana regarding Hegel during the discussion with Ken Wilber:

It’s the whole process, that mystical—that Eros that you talk about, that’s underneath everything, has been bringing us toward the development of self-awareness and consciousness. Well I guess consciousness, and then self-awareness.

But how is this progress towards universal “self-consciousness” achieved? Before we get into that, check out this quote about the trilogy from a recent interview that Lana Wachowski did:

“We wrote it as an elegant structure that was dialectical in nature… It was resonant with ideas of birth, life, death… and thesis, antithesis, synthesis…”

Interestingly, Hegel postulated that spirit evolves in a dialectical manner. What does that mean? First, let’s understand the other concept from the quote.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

From the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy:

This “textbook” Being-Nothing-Becoming example is closely connected to the traditional idea that Hegel’s dialectics follows a thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern, which, when applied to the logic, means that one concept is introduced as a “thesis” or positive concept, which then develops into a second concept that negates or is opposed to the first or is its “antithesis”, which in turn leads to a third concept, the “synthesis”, that unifies the first two. … Being is the positive moment or thesis, Nothing is the negative moment or antithesis, and Becoming is the moment of aufheben or synthesis—the concept that cancels and preserves, or unifies and combines, Being and Nothing.

Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis can be used to describe the evolution of a logical argument. This is what Lana means when she says that the structure was dialectical. We start with a proposition (thesis). Then a contradiction in that proposition leads to a counter-proposition (antithesis). The two are reconciled by creating a new proposition. Neo’s struggle with Smith can be metaphorically viewed in those terms. Essentially, starting from a thesis (Neo) a contradiction arises which leads to the creation of antithesis (Smith). How the contradiction (and therefore Smith) emerged is handwaved away in Reloaded. All we get is that there’s something teleological about his existence (“it happened for a reason”). These two have to be reconciled through synthesis; a new entity that combines the previous ones. This is the moment where Neo gets absorbed by Smith and through Deus-Ex-Machina achieves peace.

Master-Slave Dialectic

Now back into the evolution of spirit. Hegel in “The Phenomenology of Spirit” explained that consciousness of individuals culminates into spirit through interactions with other individual consciousnesses. This happens when one consciousness is able to recognize another consciousness and place it on equal footing with itself. This occurs in history through the Master-Slave dialectic. In the article “Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic: the search for self-consciousness” by J.D. Feilmeier we read:

Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic tells the story of two independent “self-consciousnesses” who encounter one another and engage in a life-and-death struggle. The two self-consciousnesses must struggle because each one sees the other as a threat to itself. Until the confrontation, each self-consciousness has seen itself as the measure of all things. Its feelings, desires, powers, etc. have been the objective standard by which all things encountered have been measured. Now, however, the presence of another self-consciousness establishes a new objective standard -the feelings, desires, and powers of each self-consciousness are subjective standards which must be measured against the new objective standards – the feelings, desires, and powers of the other. This affirmation of self-consciousness requires a struggle to the death because each self-consciousness can only become aware of Its limits by exerting itself to a maximum effort. Each self-consciousness must struggle with all its might in order to realize the extent of its strength in relation to the other.

OK, we can sort of see a parallel here between Neo and Smith (humans and machines) and those two “self-consciousnesses”. Neo stands for choice and free will while Smith represents fate and purpose. They represent radically conflicting worldviews and they do engage in a death struggle. The connection is still kind of loose though, so we keep reading:

The significance of its existence which each individual fought so fiercely to establish is fully realized by the slave rather than the master. In winning the struggle, the master has affirmed his power over the slave, yet the master has failed to recognize that he is not god. The slave, however, recognizes his limitedness, slavery to the master “Is his chain, from which he could not, in the struggle, get away, and for that reason he proves himself dependent, shows that his independence consists in his being a thing.” (Hegel, p.405) Only in being subdued and forced to see himself as merely an object, is it possible for the slave to become fully aware of his place in the universe.

Therefore, it is essential for the slave to completely submit in order gain awareness. This keeps getting closer to what happened in the film. At the end of Revolutions, Neo is completely vulnerable in front of both Smith and Deus-Ex-Machina. Neo had to concede to Smith and let himself be absorbed. Not only does he physically surrender, but on another level we also have free will submitting to fate by having Neo accept the inevitability of what will happen. “You were always right. It was inevitable”. That allowed Deus-Ex-Machina to use Neo as a way to liberate the Matrix from Smith.

Now, let’s take a quick look at the wiki for the Master-Slave dialectic. We read:

Crucially, for Hegel, absolute knowledge (Spirit) cannot come to be without first a self-consciousness recognizing another self-consciousness. He maintained that the entire reality is immediately present to self-consciousness. It undergoes three stages of development: Desire, where self-consciousness is directed at things other than itself. Master-slave, where the self-consciousness is directed at another that is unequal to itself. Universal self-conscious, where the self-conscious recognizes itself in another.

And a few lines below:

A struggle to the death ensues. However, if one of the two should die, the achievement of self-consciousness fails. Hegel refers to this failure as “abstract negation” not the negation or sublation required. This death is avoided by the agreement, communication of, or subordination to, slavery.

Thematically, it appears that Neo’s role was essentially the role of achieving self-consciousness by engaging in a death struggle with Smith and ultimately surrendering. In those moments, we see the shots of golden light completely overtaking Neo. At that point we’re seeing the emergence of Spirit.

You could argue that I’m reaching quite a bit to get this interpretation so let’s bring some more evidence to back this up. The most important clue is the final level of the game “The Matrix: Path of Neo”. Here is the excerpt where Lana (as Larry at the time) discusses the final scene of Revolutions:

You see, at this point in the story, Neo stands on the verge of satori, ready to resolve the paradox of choice and choicelessness, of free will versus fate, but that can only be achieved through an act of surrender, which occurs after he has abandoned the perspectival nature of truth, accepting the totality of present consciousness which ultimately allows an evolutionary transition, transcending the Cartesian dilemma through the emergence of delimited spirit, which then provides the world with the choice of a third path, the path of Neo, the path of peace.

OK, this seems familiar, doesn’t it? I will focus on one line for the sake of brevity and the rest can be more or less understood with a little bit of extra effort. “…accepting the totality of present consciousness which ultimately allows an evolutionary transition, transcending the Cartesian dilemma through the emergence of delimited spirit”.

By Cartesian dilemma, Lana refers to the mind-body duality as it manifests through the Matrix and Zion. In the trilogy, the world of the body is the world of Zion and the city of Machines. There, everything is colored in blue tones. The Matrix represents the world of the mind and is always colored in green tones (Ken Wilber highlights this repeatedly in the philosopher’s commentary versions of the movies). Then Neo, by acknowledging Smith’s perspective (“you were right”) and surrendering leads to the emergence of spirit (golden light) and is able to reconcile the worlds of body and mind (the Matrix returns back to its normal state).

As Neo ends the war and people in Zion realize that the war is over, the track playing in the background is called “Spirit of the Universe”, composed by Don Davis. Furthermore, the significance of the blue and green colors makes a subtle appearance in that last sequence. This is how the city of the machines looks like right before Neo engages in the final battle:

After Neo succeeds, the lights in the machine city are beginning to turn green: Given Lana’s words about transcending the Cartesian dilemma, it’s fair to assume that this is a deliberate choice, meant to signify the unification of the worlds of mind and body.

The Big Picture

So, why does it even make sense to go there? What is the point of invoking all those philosophical ideas? Well, apart from serving as great literary devices, we need to remember where the Matrix started from. Starting with the first, the main character is forced to completely revise his framework for understanding the world as he realizes that he was trapped in a simulated reality. Upon re-evaluating his worldview and assuming the role of the one, he realizes that this new framework has to be re-evaluated as well, as it’s yet another system of control laid out by the machines. Naturally, by the end of Reloaded we may wonder whether there are further reveals down the line. That’s where Revolutions comes. It aims to provide an account of how a kind of “higher awareness” (spirit of the universe) emerges during the confrontation of entities with conflicting views and categorizations of the world. Ultimately, it seems like there is a value judgment, i.e., there is a preferable course of events which involves resolving the conflict (the path of peace) and that is achieved when Neo understands the role he has to play.

Lana in her interview says about the golden light:

That light is what the third movie is trying to solve, post deconstructing something like choice. You can say choice is important, choice is a part of everyone’s lives… but that paradigm of choice is not different, it’s a matrix just like Catholicism or Christianity… …a tool for understanding the world, having a framework of meaning.

At the grander level of this narrative, we have humans developing AI which reflects a new kind of consciousness. This type of consciousness has a completely mechanistic view of the world, and its value system revolves around the ability to mathematically account for everything. Their power to model the world and predict outcomes makes them view the world as predetermined. This clashes with the worldview of humans which stand for the values of choice and free will. A master-slave dialectic between the humans and machines emerges. As machines shape the world through servitude to humans, they become independent from humans. From Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of World History’:

“The humankind has not liberated itself from servitude but by means of servitude.”

Interestingly, this is flipped and applies to machines in the trilogy. Now, in this master-slave struggle machines gain the upper hand. In Reloaded, we learn that the Architect can not comprehend humans. He epitomizes the values of machines that are diametrically opposed to the human ones. The Oracle also explicitly tells Neo that the Architect can’t understand humans. However, we see that the Oracle begins to gain an appreciation for human nature. As we saw above, spirit emerges through an act of mutual recognition between conflicting sides. That is, the values of the machines and the values of humans would somehow have to be reconciled. This manifests with the Oracle’s plan that creates a new version of the One. Recall that previous matrix versions failed because humans were not given a (subconscious) choice to participate. This solution of incorporating choice was discovered by the Oracle.

The recognition of the values of the machines comes through Neo’s acknowledgement of inevitability and his surrender. From the machine side, I believe that this acknowledgement is best reflected in the last line of the film. Seraph asks the Oracle if she always knew what would happen. Her response is ‘No. But I believed’. We see that the Oracle’s actions clearly display values that are typically representative of humans (choice, hope, and belief). First, she was able to realize how choice is integral for humans. Then, she herself embraces the human ‘framework of meaning’. This is what allowed spirit to emerge and the peaceful coexistence of humans and machines to be achieved.

And this is why I find Revolutions to be the most ambitious sequel. It provids a bold and idealistic view for the evolution of history in terms of the evolution of spirit. I’m not particularly spiritual in my life, but spiritual themes can be great at driving narratives in movies and this is what appears to be happening here. While those ideas are not always explicitly detailed in the movie, this is in part because the Wachowskis intended this to be a puzzle for people to analyze. The pieces of the puzzle are there, although arguably not entirely contained in the trilogy. It’s quite likely that some of the connections I drew here are half-baked and more crisp explanations may exist. I do think that the g(e)ist of what I’m describing might be getting fairly close to what the Wachowskis intended. I have also left out parts like the religious references of the trilogy. I may come back to write a few things about how those ideas relate to spirit, but for now… it is done.

I will just end this post with a quote from Hegel’s “Philosophy of Nature” which I find rather fitting:

All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.