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The Matrix is all about waking up from the illusion—the outward appearance of what is real—what is important. It’s about how we can barely live with positivity and need a constructed world full of suffering to keep us “happy.” I think it’s about making a third to fourth order shift in meaning making. Becoming self-reliant and self-centered, in the best possible way. It’s about identity—knowing who we are and believing. Neo is The One, but he doesn’t know it. Until he believes, he’s stuck in a limiting worldview. The Wachowski brothers are expressing the importance of the left-hand quadrants, the interior individual and collective.

This film speaks to the mystical despite religious preference. The unseen world, the world behind the matrix, is real, but not for the faint of heart. Cypher just wants to be inserted back into oblivion where he enjoy steak, even though it’s an illusion. But we can’t go back. Once we realize the existence of the world unseen, it’s too late. We’ve already taken the red pill. It reminds me of Wilber’s second fall that he describes in Up from Eden. The first fall happened in the Garden or at the beginning of human history. The second fall is when we wake up to the original fall. We want to go back, but it’s impossible. Eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is like taking the red pill. So, faithfully reporting on what I experience in the unseen world is an expression of Integral Art. Just like the Wachowskis, creating a film version of this myth, this neo-myth, I too must report what I’ve seen—the things I’ve learned.

Integral Art is a map for both creating and evaluating art using the framework of AQAL’s four quadrants. In his Journal of Integral Theory and Practice (JITP) article introducing Integral Art, Matt Rentschler quotes Ken Wilber’s definition of art: anything with a frame around it. “Regardless of medium, style, genre, or school, art can generally be defined as anything selected, arranged, or framed for its significance.” (Rentschler, 2006, p. 41) But, who decides what is significant. Building on four main schools of art critique, Rentschler takes the reader on a quadrant tour, showing the importance of taking as wide a perspective as possible.

From within my individual experience (UL), I want to express something artistically. Perhaps it is my joy at being alive, or a painful issue over which I hope to connect with others who struggle similarly. Perhaps I seek to expose an injustice, or bring awareness surrounding a tacit shared blind spot, á la The Emperor’s New Clothes. Suddenly, my subjective perspective on a social phenomenon is pushed out into the collective (LL). I hope not merely to express something, but to have impact on others—even stimulate individual and/or collective action (LR). Perhaps my art will affect institutional thinking in education, politics, or another overarching social system. Rounding the quadrants to the individual, exterior I perform certain actions with specific media to get my inside vision to the outside (UR). My art is an artifact, judged by different criteria (realism, balance, color theory) and having different effects on different viewers. And, this is only the quadrants. Renschler takes on the other four elements in his companion article in the same issue of the journal.