[Paracelsus]

Quote:

I’m literally cringing while typing this, but I also think that a lot of people—particularly people in creative fields, whose professional lives have less predictable trajectories—see themselves as always on the brink of “making it.” Like, “Well, my career is just about to take off, after which I’ll be rich and famous, and then I’ll have access to better, hotter people.”

The Last Psychiatrist on The Matrix:

Quote:

"No, no, it doesn't end like this. Not like this." [she dies.]

The Schizotypal State:

It wasn't supposed to be like this. By this age, things were supposed to have happened for you. You were supposed to be somebody. Someone was supposed to have fallen in love with you.

What is called the "world" doesn't seem like what you thought it would be.... there's a lack of emotional connection; a lack of highs and lows, of change, of either growth or regression. No energy. There's no real love. Instead is trudging, boredom.... ennui. There's nothing happening in your life; yet you feel like it's out of control.

Neo: I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.
Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad...

You walk through life diligently performing the tasks assigned to you, automatically. But always the thousand yard stare, the tiniest expectation that it is all about to change. More than fantasy but less than delusion, you hold active the remote probability that you are more than your current appearance. You're not unfinished, you're undiscovered.

If, in the preposterous situation of alien invasion or talent scout or ninja attack, you'd know exactly what to do. You'd be able to do it.

It seems that you've been living two lives. One life, you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life... where you go by the alias "Neo"... One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.

It is the reverse of Nausea, it's Constipation. You have a completely defined, detailed identity, but it never got a chance to come out. The world wouldn't cooperate. The problem is the world.

You know you don't really know kung fu. You know ninjas aren't going to attack. But you know a secret: that the impossible thing is a ninja attack, not that you would know kung fu if ninjas attacked. In a reality which would permit the existence of a ninja attack, it is inevitable that it would allow you to know kung fu.

What kind of a reality is it that blocks impossible scenarios, but treats them as prerequisites?

Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

A reality that is still, partially, under your influence.

The Matrix was the articulated solution to a growing existential crisis. It gave us hope: "Unless there's solid reason not to, I'm just going to allow the possibility that there's more to reality than what I see, and so there may be a valid reason to hope that my real life will kick in any time. And then someone will love me."

I know kung fu.

"No, but when I need to, I will."

The Matrix could have carried us, could have kept the Schizotypal state active, maybe for another ten years. It gave Narcissism the strength to look reality in the face and say, "my identity is bigger than you, I don't care what you do, if I needed to, I could control you."