Taking both pills

In my last post, "Alcohol, Islam, and Morpheus," I posted this meme, which references Neo from The Matrix taking both pills instead of choosing one:

I noted the sync with an image I had posted just three days before:

I had posted that because (as Bill pointed out), it ties in with the sync theme of glasses with a red right lens and a blue left lens, since the red and blue pills are each reflected in the appropriate lens of Morpheus's sunglasses. As Bill wrote in the comment (on "Squaring the circle, and more red and blue eyes") drawing this to my attention,

Each of the images of the pills in Morpheus' lenses has a corresponding image of Neo, almost as if there are two different Neos, one who is associated with the red, and the other the blue.

This suggests something like "Shaul Behr's proposed solution to the paradox of free will and omniscience." Rabbi Behr's theory, as illustrated in his two Ari Barak novels, is that each time a person is faced with a moral choice, the universe splits into two parallel universes. One version of the person makes the right choice in one universe, while another version of him in a parallel universe makes the wrong choice. In other words, Neo takes both pills.

In my post critiquing Rabbi Behr's model, I began by quoting the beginning of a Robert Frost poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood . . . 

In Rabbi Behr's novels, every time two roads diverge, we do travel both -- but do so by not remaining one traveler.

In church today (more on that in another post), one of the speakers said that one of his personal mottoes was, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." What he meant was that making a choice, any choice, was preferable to being paralyzed by indecision. Taken at face value, though, the motto seems to tell us to take both roads in the yellow wood, or both pills.

WanderingGondola left a comment on my post with the both-pills meme, which I reproduce here both to make it searchable and to add inline the images and videos she linked to:

This "both" theme is rather funny as I've been encountering it independently. It wasn't too long after "Red and blue spectacles" that I found a version of the below meme in the comments of some Pinterest post. (Also, playing Wuthering Waves later that night, I took renewed interest in another red and blue-green pair. I'll save other finds for another comment.)

Then last night, J linked me to imgur.com/v4bGcEG; I can't view the comments (browser issue?) but he indicated they were about the Matrix sequels, and shared a few about the fourth one, Resurrections, made in 2021. (Checking which XKCD strip that was just now, I found it's not a whole strip but the last four panels of a larger one... and there's another "both pills".)

No more than half an hour after that, I decided to catch up on messages in a Discord channel. The first unread message was someone's update on a game in development, and the below screenshot shows part of an initial reply.

I guess that vid was used because, according to Wiki, the movie has Mr. Anderson as a game creator within a new Matrix.

When I (meaning William; I've finished quoting WG) went to YouTube to watch the above video, this thumbnail in the sidebar ("The New Matrix Was Bad On Purpose") caught my eye:

As Bill wrote, it's "almost as if there are two different Neos, one who is associated with the red, and the other the blue." In the right lens is the Neo we all know and love, who took the red pill. In the left lens is the bearded sequel version who, as far as I can tell from that montage, took the blue pill.

This afternoon, I ran across this image on a handbill advertising an upcoming performance at National Taichung Theater:

It shows a man with a blue lens over his left eye only. There's no red lens on the right, but there is a rabbit, and as we know, you take the red pill if you want to see "how deep the rabbit hole goes." Clic is apparently a Spanish dystopian sci-fi puppet show that asks the question, "Will we one day be able to save our souls on a hard disk?" Not a million miles from the premise of The Matrix.

A few hours later, I was using the Brave browser app on my phone and, for the first time that I can recall, it solicited my feedback:

To me that suggested the red and blue lenses yet again -- with the red right lens being on the left side of the picture, as in most of the images we have seen. As with Morpheus's sunglasses above, each lens has a little face in it.

"How's your experience?" it asks. In The Matrix,  taking the red or the blue pill doesn't change the facts about the world you live in; it only changes how you experience it. The pills are in that sense "lenses" through which the world is perceived -- and so wearing a pair of glasses with one red lens and one blue lens is equivalent to taking both pills.

Bill wrote about Morpheus's sunglasses:

The Neos faces sit in the place of where Morpheus' eyes would be, or more specifically perhaps his pupils. Neo as a 'pupil' here, with one a pupil of the red and the other a pupil of the blue could be symbolically relevant.

Being big on etymosophy, Bill will likely be aware that pupil comes from a Latin word meaning "doll" (whence also pupa, puppet, and pupil in the sense of "young student") and that "The eye region was so called from the tiny image one sees of oneself reflected in the eye of another." This reminds me of something I wrote in a 2021 post, "To the ones . . .," commenting on the dedicatory poem with which Whitley Strieber begins his memoir Communion. First, the poem:

To the ones who have slipped into the mirror,

And the ones who reflect it in their eyes.

To the ones who must hide everything,

And the ones who lose what they hide.

To the ones who cannot be silent,

And the ones who must lie.

In the post, I wrote:

Imagine putting on a pair of mirror shades and looking into your bathroom mirror. You'd see your reflection in the mirror, and in the reflection's shades a reflection of your reflection, and in that reflection's shades . . . well, you'd have an infinite series of reflections, like one of those Yaoi Kusama "infinity room" installations. (Strieber is exactly the kind of guy who would have gone to see those when they first appeared, the same year as Pale Fire.)

Now take off the shades. You may not have all-natural mirror-shade eyes like a Gray, but your pupils are dark. They reflect. Look closely, can you see your face in there? Stare as hard as you can. You might want to get a little closer to the mirror -- closer -- careful now, don't slip!

Slipping into the mirror is what Alice does -- hence the title Through the Looking-glass -- and this is alluded to in The Matrix, when Neo reaches out to touch a mirror and finds that his hand can go right through it.

Note added: The thumbnail for the Matrix Resurrections video WG linked also shows Neo touching a mirror, but this is blue-pilled Neo, so his finger doesn't go through.