The Matrix and Star Trek
In 1997, January 29th precisely, 3rd season, episode 15 of Star Trek Voyager, 'Coda' aired. It used a concept of the Matrix, prior to the movie 'the Matrix.' Not unusual, as the concept for the 'matrix' has likely been around in some form or another for a while. The Implicate Order, by David Bohm, has been around since the 80s? The concept of Maya goes back thousands of years. And this wasn't even a treatise on Simulation Theory, which was likely better addressed by the episode of Next Gen- 'Ship in a Bottle' Season 6, episode 12, which leaves us, or Barclay, with the question- 'maybe we're all in someone else's simulation....'
What interests me in this episode of Voyager is that it stands pretty close to the alien conspiracy theory that earth is essentially a prison planet, and going into the light is how souls continue to get recycled. There are several version of this. The scientologist have a version. So did the original Gnostics. This episode makes the whole ordeal a bit more sinister in the fact that human souls are the primary food source for these non-corporeal aliens that catch people up in a web matrix, like a spider Chakotay presupposes... He offers his analogy while giving Janeway a rose... Was that, too, a symbolic gesture? A rose by any other name... What is a rose, or any flower's flowers function? To draw in creature to help pollinate? Where better to set up a web to catch people, or flies, than by a flower? Why do humans give flowers? Symbolic request to pollinate?
My questions tend to derail me and get me away from the subject at hand. Jokes about 'don't go into the light' are numerous, it's a train, it's a headlight to a car... Who knows what the old lady in Poltergeist was thinking. We just don't know enough in general. It's not like death was already scary enough, we have to worry about sinister plots to take our souls? We have to worry we merit up? The Ferry man wants to be paid, and the gods want the scales to balance, and by the way, now, ''we want to eat your soul...'
Damn soul eaters! If there is anything eternal, even its that something big, like the Universe itself, then by definition, there is something that is immortal? Soul seems to capture the essence of evolution and progress while also maintaining the essence of what was... There's something here to explore. An adult is not the child, but that quintessential quality of child is always with the adult.
The discussions of souls, the after life, in writing, can go back as far as Plato- as the Greeks offered the first forays into an 'academic' pursuit of the matter. One can argue the same for both the Egyptian and Tibetan book of the Dead were this, even if it was steeped in mythos, but between Michael Newton, 'Journey of Souls,' and p. m. h. Atwater's 'Big Book of Near Death Experiences' I doubt there is better anthology of reports of what to expect. I think Newton is more likely to make speculative supposition than Atwater, who I think is more likely to simply report the testimony. And I am not even saying Newton is wrong, as we all tend to box things into a particular order to make sense of data, especially in the absence of greater evidence. One thing that tends to interest me the most is the hostility to this subject by the academics, which is the same level towards the subject of UFOs. Even if its the experience boils down to only being subjective, I imagine there would simply be more academic explorations of this thing that is consistent back to time memorial. We debate the subjective meaning behind literature and call that academic, but not reports of glimpses into the human soul? If they're all just from the brain, are they not both essential?
From an esoteric perspective, 'Coda' stands out to me as originating from someone who is 'academically' minded, who likes science, and has accepted, at some level, these reports that people have, from culture to culture, from generation to generation, of having some validity- indeed, must have for this thing to work on any level! Star Trek has always been about "WHAT IF!" and so the question here is 'what if it were aliens eating our souls?!' and author thinks, 'wow, i could make a star trek episode out of this.' I don't know that to be true. Maybe they aren't academic or science orientated and they just had this idea for a Voyager episode. Maybe it wasn't even written for Voyager to begin with, but they tweaked it to give to Voyager. I could see it being written for the Twilight Zone, or something in the lines of horror, but they didn't want to lose it and so they tweaked it and submitted it- and maybe the producers accepted it because, let's smack the 'Near Deathers' in the head with this; kind of an underhanded smite. Janeway's revulsion to getting eaten is reasonable, but from a higher perspective, her anger and revulsions seems to be something greater than to what the episode itself is selling. This feels like a righteous agenda, with Scientology undertones- 'don't go into the light! (Insert Bothan meme here: "it's a trap!")
Many Bothans died to bring you this message. Clearly, I don't know anything about the afterlife. I have had some 'transpersonal' experiences which don't fit anything in my paradigm of origin. I can speculate as to their relative meaning, but can't apply them to anything beyond me, or even make a systems approach to it. What interests me about 'Coda' is on the face of it, for this episode to work, we all must have some general knowledge of the thing occurring to us (as a society,) even if it it's minimally just accepting that the reports of this sort of thing have validity. If nothing else, this episode lends testimony that thing is diffused to such a degree in our society that it can resonates with us as being something to consider, even if it's just to spin fiction and laugh nervously about what's awaiting us all. Fiction does make things easier to discuss. It gives a broader context that we can visit it without being ridiculed. But this episode also wreak of hidden agendas. I remember hating it right out of the chute, maybe because it touched something in me that i hadn't considered. Maybe I consider the light sacred.
In this, I revisit the concept of the Rose. Why do we give women roses? Why do we buy them stuff at all and take them on dates? That kind of taste like 'grooming.' Do we ever come together as equals and just share affection and ideas because we like each other, or do we have to cultivate people and bring them into our camps slowly. I am in the camp that there is something more in the after life, something actually good. I think I would go into the light voluntarily. I get the sense, from the literature, it's not quite voluntary. People tend to get taken somewhere, as if drawn by a magnet, or pushed by a wind. If you read one of my previous discussions about how neural scientist say that we don't decide anything, that's an illusions, and that all of our choices are made anywhere from 80 milliseconds to 10 seconds prior to becoming aware of having made a choice, then there is a strong argument that we never get to decide. Somehow, I think that is a part of all of this, too. What I find interesting is when the hypnotist asks the subject to describe movement, no one is interpreting the movement, the way we do in our brains with the interpreter module- they simply report, I am moving along this gird like channel... I am moving through this tunnel... Some people report resisting, to no avail. We simply go. That's kind of spooky from this perspective, when i think I have free will, even though I have absolute evidence I have none! So after life experiences are more truthful than physical experiences?
Let me say that last part clearly: Not only do we have tailor made experiences here in the physical life, but our conclusions are frequently false! Maybe the only choice, when discussing free will, is our emotional reaction to any of this. We can be afraid, or we can embrace it all with love. Some things are much harder to embrace, hug, and say I am peace with you, but maybe, that, too, is the practice. There are parts of my dream world that scare the crap out of me. Funny how I can scare myself so badly i wake up. Some things annoy me. Mostly, my dreams are the joy of my life and I long to improve dream memory and be aware when I am dreaming.
If it all boils down to all NDE reside in the dying brain, and the research shows that one's brain can linger for hours before being completely dead, then it seems reasonable the more I work on my inner experiences and improving dreaming the better- we all go there, but it's not an outside entity that's eating us. It's ourselves.
What interests me in this episode of Voyager is that it stands pretty close to the alien conspiracy theory that earth is essentially a prison planet, and going into the light is how souls continue to get recycled. There are several version of this. The scientologist have a version. So did the original Gnostics. This episode makes the whole ordeal a bit more sinister in the fact that human souls are the primary food source for these non-corporeal aliens that catch people up in a web matrix, like a spider Chakotay presupposes... He offers his analogy while giving Janeway a rose... Was that, too, a symbolic gesture? A rose by any other name... What is a rose, or any flower's flowers function? To draw in creature to help pollinate? Where better to set up a web to catch people, or flies, than by a flower? Why do humans give flowers? Symbolic request to pollinate?
My questions tend to derail me and get me away from the subject at hand. Jokes about 'don't go into the light' are numerous, it's a train, it's a headlight to a car... Who knows what the old lady in Poltergeist was thinking. We just don't know enough in general. It's not like death was already scary enough, we have to worry about sinister plots to take our souls? We have to worry we merit up? The Ferry man wants to be paid, and the gods want the scales to balance, and by the way, now, ''we want to eat your soul...'
Damn soul eaters! If there is anything eternal, even its that something big, like the Universe itself, then by definition, there is something that is immortal? Soul seems to capture the essence of evolution and progress while also maintaining the essence of what was... There's something here to explore. An adult is not the child, but that quintessential quality of child is always with the adult.
The discussions of souls, the after life, in writing, can go back as far as Plato- as the Greeks offered the first forays into an 'academic' pursuit of the matter. One can argue the same for both the Egyptian and Tibetan book of the Dead were this, even if it was steeped in mythos, but between Michael Newton, 'Journey of Souls,' and p. m. h. Atwater's 'Big Book of Near Death Experiences' I doubt there is better anthology of reports of what to expect. I think Newton is more likely to make speculative supposition than Atwater, who I think is more likely to simply report the testimony. And I am not even saying Newton is wrong, as we all tend to box things into a particular order to make sense of data, especially in the absence of greater evidence. One thing that tends to interest me the most is the hostility to this subject by the academics, which is the same level towards the subject of UFOs. Even if its the experience boils down to only being subjective, I imagine there would simply be more academic explorations of this thing that is consistent back to time memorial. We debate the subjective meaning behind literature and call that academic, but not reports of glimpses into the human soul? If they're all just from the brain, are they not both essential?
From an esoteric perspective, 'Coda' stands out to me as originating from someone who is 'academically' minded, who likes science, and has accepted, at some level, these reports that people have, from culture to culture, from generation to generation, of having some validity- indeed, must have for this thing to work on any level! Star Trek has always been about "WHAT IF!" and so the question here is 'what if it were aliens eating our souls?!' and author thinks, 'wow, i could make a star trek episode out of this.' I don't know that to be true. Maybe they aren't academic or science orientated and they just had this idea for a Voyager episode. Maybe it wasn't even written for Voyager to begin with, but they tweaked it to give to Voyager. I could see it being written for the Twilight Zone, or something in the lines of horror, but they didn't want to lose it and so they tweaked it and submitted it- and maybe the producers accepted it because, let's smack the 'Near Deathers' in the head with this; kind of an underhanded smite. Janeway's revulsion to getting eaten is reasonable, but from a higher perspective, her anger and revulsions seems to be something greater than to what the episode itself is selling. This feels like a righteous agenda, with Scientology undertones- 'don't go into the light! (Insert Bothan meme here: "it's a trap!")
Many Bothans died to bring you this message. Clearly, I don't know anything about the afterlife. I have had some 'transpersonal' experiences which don't fit anything in my paradigm of origin. I can speculate as to their relative meaning, but can't apply them to anything beyond me, or even make a systems approach to it. What interests me about 'Coda' is on the face of it, for this episode to work, we all must have some general knowledge of the thing occurring to us (as a society,) even if it it's minimally just accepting that the reports of this sort of thing have validity. If nothing else, this episode lends testimony that thing is diffused to such a degree in our society that it can resonates with us as being something to consider, even if it's just to spin fiction and laugh nervously about what's awaiting us all. Fiction does make things easier to discuss. It gives a broader context that we can visit it without being ridiculed. But this episode also wreak of hidden agendas. I remember hating it right out of the chute, maybe because it touched something in me that i hadn't considered. Maybe I consider the light sacred.
In this, I revisit the concept of the Rose. Why do we give women roses? Why do we buy them stuff at all and take them on dates? That kind of taste like 'grooming.' Do we ever come together as equals and just share affection and ideas because we like each other, or do we have to cultivate people and bring them into our camps slowly. I am in the camp that there is something more in the after life, something actually good. I think I would go into the light voluntarily. I get the sense, from the literature, it's not quite voluntary. People tend to get taken somewhere, as if drawn by a magnet, or pushed by a wind. If you read one of my previous discussions about how neural scientist say that we don't decide anything, that's an illusions, and that all of our choices are made anywhere from 80 milliseconds to 10 seconds prior to becoming aware of having made a choice, then there is a strong argument that we never get to decide. Somehow, I think that is a part of all of this, too. What I find interesting is when the hypnotist asks the subject to describe movement, no one is interpreting the movement, the way we do in our brains with the interpreter module- they simply report, I am moving along this gird like channel... I am moving through this tunnel... Some people report resisting, to no avail. We simply go. That's kind of spooky from this perspective, when i think I have free will, even though I have absolute evidence I have none! So after life experiences are more truthful than physical experiences?
Let me say that last part clearly: Not only do we have tailor made experiences here in the physical life, but our conclusions are frequently false! Maybe the only choice, when discussing free will, is our emotional reaction to any of this. We can be afraid, or we can embrace it all with love. Some things are much harder to embrace, hug, and say I am peace with you, but maybe, that, too, is the practice. There are parts of my dream world that scare the crap out of me. Funny how I can scare myself so badly i wake up. Some things annoy me. Mostly, my dreams are the joy of my life and I long to improve dream memory and be aware when I am dreaming.
If it all boils down to all NDE reside in the dying brain, and the research shows that one's brain can linger for hours before being completely dead, then it seems reasonable the more I work on my inner experiences and improving dreaming the better- we all go there, but it's not an outside entity that's eating us. It's ourselves.
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