The recent release, pleasant reviews, and prompt box-office bomb of The Matrix Resurrections can’t help but 1) make me feel old, but also 2) recall just what a revelation the original Matrix was clear back in 1999, when I was still in High School. For an entire generation of Millennials of a certain age, it was our earliest introduction to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave–that ancient idea that we all but perceive the shadows of reality, instead of their real thing.

And indeed, Plato’s allegory has good physiological basis: we do not see each other directly, after all, but only the light that has reflected off of each other, which then strikes our optic nerves, where that sensory data in turn must be formed into a mental image somewhere within the electro-chemical reactions of our brains. As we’ve all wondered as children, how do we know what looks like red to you actually looks like green to me, but we both still call it red? How do we have any basis at all for assuming that any of us perceive reality correctly? For that matter, do we have any basis for assuming that our senses perceive any reality at all?

If our eyes sometimes play tricks on you, how do you know they aren’t playing tricks on you all the time? How can you trust your senses in anything? Really, how do you know you aren’t just dreaming everything? How do you know you aren’t just being dreamed? (This was also the plot to Inception, recall). How do you know you aren’t just in a computer simulation, plugged into the matrix? How do you know all of your memories and perceptions of reality haven’t just been planted there by a machine (which was also the plot to Blade Runner, recall)? How do we know we aren’t all just a dream in the mind of God?

Of course, none of us take these questions all that seriously, not really. If we’re crossing the street and see a car run a red light barreling towards us, we do not ponder, “I wonder if this car is real or if it is only a figment of a dream, a glitch in the matrix?” No, we jump out of the way, maybe scream and swear at the reckless driver. But I would like to emphasize that even in these near-death experiences, we are all still very matter-of-factly assuming that reality really does exist–or more precisely, that our senses are communicating to us some sort of concrete reality that exists–beyond our own fallible senses.

That is, we are exercising faith.

I bring this up merely as a reminder that the Spirit is sometimes fallible–or at least, our ability to feel it is often fallible and fraught with distortions born of our own ingrained prejudices, biases, and sheer wishful thinking. (Such is how we end up with things like racist Priesthood bans and child exclusion policies, but that must be a topic for another day.) Such is enough to cause many members of the Church (understandably, I might add!) to conclude that the Spirit does not actually exist at all, that in fact there is no greater or higher Celestial reality that is being communicated to us via our spiritual senses, that we are but feeling our own wishful thinking and nothing more, that all is vanity and our faith is vain.

But as the Apostle Paul said, “we see through a glass, darkly,” (1 Cor. 13:12), and never all that clearly. Our regular senses do that, too (anyone who has to wear glasses already knows that). That does not mean that we don’t still see something. Maybe we’ll never get out of the Matrix, or leave Plato’s Cave, or wake-up from Cobb’s dream, or figure out if Decker’s a Replicant, ever in this life–but if we sometimes don’t quite know how to interpret this Holy Spirit that we feel, we can at least trust that it is revealing to us something, just as literally all our other senses do.

We all walk by faith, whether we want to or not.

By way of analogy, the novelist & essayist David Foster Wallace famously said in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address:

“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. […] Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.”

Similarly, the compelling reason for expanding your already-extant conception of faith to also take in the spiritual that you also already feel, is that anything short of that will eat you alive as well–keeping you trapped in your head and lost in your own narrow thoughts. By contrast, letting yourself trust the sneaking suspicion that there is something more going on than our physical senses immediately detect will lift both your sights and your spirits as well.