The Living Matrix
A Film on the New Science of Healing
Directed by: Greg Becker, 2009

Ten years ago, I would have been highly skeptical of a movie such as The Living Matrix.  Much of what is covered in the movie is criticized in the mainstream scientific community.   I would not have been able to believe it.  What can I say?  Some things change.  What has changed in me is my perception.  My perception has changed, in part, due to some experiences.  These experiences defy modern science and western explanations for the unknowable.

The Living Matrix is a documentary of sorts that seeks to explore and explain modalities that one reviewer described as a “mish-mash of different techniques with no commonalities and no coherent explanatory mechanism.”

And I agree; it is a hodgepodge of personal stories and experiences backed by a gee-wiz-isn’t-this-cool kind of scientific inquiry.  So no, The Living Matrix doesn’t conclusively prove a coherent explanatory mechanism.  Rather, it suggests a commonality to the healings that exists outside the traditional scope of western medicine, and is perhaps even outside our own body.  They call it the field.

The many talking heads featured in The Living Matrix discuss that our understanding of how our systems interact is changing.  There is a focus on various forms of energy healing modalities such as, The Reconnection, Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and Thought Field Therapy (TFT or EFT).  They examine how our understanding of genetics is evolving, and how our environment, beliefs and “emotional diet” can affect our overall health.

Some of the discussion hints back to explanations we have lost touch with.  Spoken and native cultures across continents and throughout the ages have viewed the universe as a continuum.  And we, mankind, are central in that universe.   With the advent of western science, Isaac Newton and René Descartes created an explanation that pulled man from this universal connectedness, separating mind from body, and the individual from the group consciousness.

Sir Issac

Science writer and author Lynne McTaggart states early in the movie:  “That idea of separation is the foundation of western thinking.  Newton described a very well behaved universe, of separate things operating in space and time according to fixed laws”.  She suggests the model modern medicine has been working with, “the idea of the body… as this well behaved machine, with the two engines of the body being the brain and the heart, and the whole central orchestra being conducted by DNA,” is wrong.

“What’s wrong with that,” McTaggart says, “is just about everything.”

The Living Matrix then explores how our bodies are decentralized and follows scientists who are clearly looking for other explanations than the ones western science has offered in the last few centuries that focus on matter.  They are questioning where we begin, and where we end.

Eastern philosophies suggest that we are not our mind, we are not our body… our essence is not material.  And yet, if you take a word like Yoga, which in Sanskrit is defined as “union” or “to yoke,” the practice of Yoga is to acknowledge a connectedness between systems that western medicine has attempted to sever.

The movie and its subjects are definitely questioning how we heal and the role energy/electricity plays in chronic illness, the transmission of information in the body and how we become conscious.  They are setting out to explain why thoughts and beliefs affect us so.  I’m not suggesting that the science The Living Matrix explores is complete in any manner.  I do question the resistance, though.  The scientists interviewed seem to have the right amount of intrigue and awe in what they are discovering and attempting to explain.

The Living Matrix is well worth the watch, even if you can’t quite believe it.