the matrix-what is it?

This site has a story that is freakin awesome.

http://www.followtheleader.ca/info/resources/poems/awakening.htm

This story calls attention to the kind of paridigms that are instilled in us from a young age. These are presupositions that everyone has within our minds, the notions and values that go without saying.
THese notions shape our world view and cause us to block out stimulus that doesn't fit our meta narrative for fear of having to find a new paradigm.
But this is how we grow.
In mythologies around the world, the trickster spirit is the only one capable of really teaching humans anything because they present them with a problem that doesnt fit the world view, causing us to either go into denial, or emerge into a large shell, as Hesse talks about in his novel, Demian.
It is this notion I want to talk about as concerns the matrix.
The Matrix is not merely the world the machines have created, but the world of man as well. As the Buddhists of the order-of-bendin'-spoons say: all is illusion, all is false.

Wiki, on Simulacra and Simulation: "“ The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.[1]"

This reminds me of a story I read somewhere about the god of illusion and suffering, Mara. In the story, Mara and one of his consorts are walking down a city street. Mara and the follower pass an ascetic who is meditating on the sidewalk with a blissful smile.
"dosn't it bother you when you see a man experiencing epiphanies like that?" asks the evil disciple.
"No," says Mara confidently, "After the experience, people usually form a belief out of it."
IN other words, experience is what is real, not any kind of formed belief.
There is no spoon, yo!

Again, the wiki article:
Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra and identifies each with a historical period:

First order, associated with the pre-modern period, where the image is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item.
Second order, associated with the industrial Revolution, where distinctions between image and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-produced copies. The item's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the original version.
Third order, associated with the postmodern age, where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation breaks down. There is only the simulacrum.[2]

Here, in the real world, Plato's allegory of the cave is alive and kicking.
We all make haste not to actually live in the real world, not to actually
muse, but to be a-mused. That is, to sit before the wretched Television box and drool, zone out, space out, click off, go tarded. This is how we quiet our inner voices, our spirituality. Video games, my space and television are socially sanctioned versions of heroine in that they allow us to continue to exist without challenging out paradigms, without entering into the beauty of always becoming, of constant and never-ending awakening to the beauty of the dream. Like the bliss that Bill Murray finds is quite capable of making even the most maddening recurrence seem fresh and new.
A friend of mine once told me her parents told her that TV was created by aliens so that they could have the whole human race distracted whilst they scoop out man-brains with a spoon.
Strangely enough, I think this statement has allot of truth, .