The Matrix: Political-Religious-Implications

[RonPrice]

MATRIX

The film The Matrix was released in Australia the very week I taught my last classes as a full-time professional teacher, April 8th 1999. I had been teaching for thirty years. I won't summarize the details of the plot and all the characters. But some of the theme is as follows: a fundamental discovery is made about the world that it doesn't exist. It's actually a form of Virtual Reality designed to lull people into lives of blind obedience to the system. People obediently go to their jobs every day without knowing that Matrix is the wool that has been pulled over their eyes. The reality of life is that people are slaves. The rebels want to crack the framework that holds this Matrix in place thus freeing humankind. Some believe a messianic One will lead a social uprising; this messianic One will possess both mind power and physical strength. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 November 2006 with thanks to Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, March 31st 1999.

The world has been in a great sleep

from which it is slowly waking

thanks to that messianic One

and the uprising has begun

silently, unobtrusively, for

the revolution is global and

out of man's control--it is also

spiritual--having begun within

the Shaykhi school of the Ithna-

Ashariyyih sect of Shiah Islam.

But don't tell anyone--it's the

best kept secret-non-secret in

the world and it is slowly rising

from the obscurity in which it

has been shrouded for 160 years.

Ron Price

4 November 2006

[Figleaf]

Lawrence Fishburn's big speech in the first Matrix was brilliant. The rest of the film was good, but it didn't live up to the expectations the speech created.

[RonPrice]

There is the film"The Matrix," but there are all sorts of matrices....I writeabout a few of them here.

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Eliot's Wasteland matrix:

There will be, I am inclined to think, many who will read this work and find it not to their taste. And I am reminded of what one writer said of T.S. Eliot and his poem The Wasteland, perhaps the most famous poem of the twentieth century. That poem, The Wasteland, he wrote “was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life." What a reader gets from a work is quite an idiosyncratic reality. It is something I have little control over once I have let loose this work. In the end a writer must please himself. Gibbon became an autobiographer for the same reason he became an historian: to see a pattern, a plan in what might appear from a distance to be a welter of haphazard, chaotic or contradictory experience. I have done the same. I do not expect my readers to see the same pattern.

A Developing World Order Matrix:

DISTANT GARDENS

The second century(1944-2044) is destined to witness...the first stirrings of that World Order, of which the present Administrative System is at once the precursor, the nuc- leus and pattern-an Order which, as it slowly crystallizes and radiates its benign influ- ence...will proclaim the coming of age of the whole human race. -Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, pp.72-73.

The Parthenon, or whatever, is universal because it can continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience. It is simply as impossibility that any one today should experience the Parthenon as the devout Athenian contemporary citizen exper- ienced it...The enduring art-product...was called forth by something occasional, something having its own date and place. But what was evoked is a substance so formed that it can enter into the experience of others and enable them to have more intense and more fully rounded out experiences of their own. -John Dewey, Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, NY, 1958(1934), p. 109.

And so it is universal

and will go on being so

down the halls of time,

enriching and intensifying

the experience of those

who are willing to share in its beauty,

to experience it as something new,

something mine,

to which I give the meaning,

reordering colour and shape

in relation to myself,

to experience delight and overcome

the inchoate, restricted, apathetic, tepid,

fearful, conventional, routine

through some expansion, intensification,

fullness: ordering matter through form,

on this journey to these far places,

these distant gardens.

Ron Price

23 December 1995

My Music Martrix:

GUITAR + SHOCKS = POETRY

"Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig down deeper. One would say that the shock of suffering and vision breaks down, one after another, the living sensitive partitions behind which his identity is hiding. He is harassed, he is tracked down, he is destroyed...He dies and is reborn in and with poetry.....He discovers an essentially free, objectless, creativity in poetry. With each poem, the poet creates a world and savours it." Such are Maritain's words and they have a certain resonance with my own thoughts, except I still can sing and do, although not often. -Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, New American Library, NY, 1953, pp.130-177.

I was soaked in music in the ‘60s

and like a wandering minstrel

for twenty-five years

I took that ubiquitous guitar,

moved to sing, to song,

the pioneer singer.

But the shocks kept coming;

the fires died.

There was nothing left to sing,

except dry bones deep down

on the edges of my tongue,

somewhere in my heart.

In my brain a new music did I find,

a certain verbal sound

filled with thought and meaning

deep in the womb,

of some poetic intuition

with tact, subtlety,

to express the inexpressible

in common speech, human voice:

close to my heart,

defining what my thoughts are like,

conferring nobility on words.

Still did I sing old songs

for old folks,

last notes dredged-up

for occasions

to try to bring a little joy

to withered faces,

last breaths before death

carried them away.1

1 So it was that once a month I joined a small choir of 4 to 8 people who sang at Ainsley House for senior citizens here in George Town.

Ron Price

22 December 1995/

25 April 2003.

The world's spiritual history matrix:

UNSURPASSED HOLINESS

Ours is the duty.....to play our part, however small, in this greatest drama of the world’s spiritual history. -Shoghi Effendi, 21 March 1930, in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, USA, 1974, p.26.

Even when all these marble edifaces

with their inaccessible mysteries,

their attendant gardens are complete

we are still faced with ordinary dust.

The domestic orange trees

will still be as unendearing as ever,

contented perhaps in their green universe,

having been taught submission

(you can tell by their roundness).

The geraniums will still be

as pedestrian and obtuse as ever.

The only thing you’ve got here, mate,

is what you have lavishly invested

with your aspiration and belief.

You can grow weary of nightingales

and peacocks, the uselessness of words,

the fruitlessness of speculation.

You’ll find here among the frail petals

no formula for perfection.

The disinterested cypresses,

even though they point heavenward,

will offer no certain answer to your questions.

The jasmine may captivate your senses

and paralyse your will,

but the sense of urgency will not leave you

nor this place for some time;

for the hour is perilous and dark

and the rush of history is moving

toward the climax of a spiritual drama

of staggering magnitude

which so few are yet aware: be warned!

Just resume your ordinary life

with its deadlines and schedules.

The taxi will soon speed you

to your destination.

The airport can sell you a postcard

of the place which will soon be the stage

for the enactment of several critical acts

in a play of unsurpassed holiness.

Have a safe trip home.

Ron Price

28 December 1995

The Matrix on Mt. Carmel:

I CAN SEE YOU NOW

I have found it difficult in the last several years to get my mind off the Arc that is being built on Mt Carmel. It fills me with profound pleasure and ardent expectations.

-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 23 December 1995.

For if we look back at one hundred years of an unexampled history of unremitting progress, we also look forward to many centuries of unfolding fulfillment of divine purpose...incrementally realized.... -Universal House of Justice, Ridvan, 1992, p.1.

I can see you now: close and distant,

near and far, with pregnant and tragic import,

loosening and tightening,

expanding and contracting,

separating and compacting,

soaring and drooping,

rising and falling,

dispersive and scattering,

hovering and brooding,

unsubstantial lightness,

massive blow--

such is the stuff you are made of,

up on that hill, over there,

infinitely diversified,

but I can express you here:

the significant, the relevant,

compressed and intensified

in some exalted rising, surging

and retreating, the sudden thrust,

the gradual insinuation

until I am obsessed with your wonder

and can hardly take my mind off of you:

the enduring, the voluminous, the solid,

room, filling, power, energy of position

and motion, rightness in placing.

And so I am in poised readiness

to meet your surrounding forces,

to persist, to endure with some energy

and some opportunity for action

with my unique experience,

gradually letting you yield to me

in the changing light and moods,

your enduring sacredness

and charm and your monumental

register of cherished expectations.

Ron Price

23 December 1995

The Gothic Cathedral Matrix:

A SWEET NEW LIFE

"People entering Gothic cathedrals left behind their life of material cares and seemed to pass into a different world," writes Kenneth Clark as he makes his feelings of the arts contagious in his book Civilization. In other ages buildings were constructed simply to give pleasure. Twentieth century wars have destroyed many of these buildings in a fit of modern barbarism. As this was taking place, as this barbarism was hacking into the evidences of civilization humans had erected over many centuries, a small and embryonic community that followed the teachings of its prophet-founders, the Bab and Baha'u'llah, began to erect new symbols of a new civilization.-Ron Price with thanks to Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Pelican Books, 1969, p. 167.

It was an age of minarettes

that staggered the imagination,

built high into the sky,

immense heaps of stone

and glass and aluminium.

It was also the end

of the Heroic Age

and the start

of the Formative Age

and they used this social art,

architecture,

to help us lead fuller lives,

to touch life at many points,

to give us that douceur de vivre,

that sweetness of life

at places all over the world.

Ron Price

29 May 2003

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