Chapter 14
Leaving the Matrix
Leaving the Matrix is not leaving the planet: it is changing your own reality. Bairo and the memory of a more prosperous version that hasn't happened yet.
On March 31, 1999, a Wednesday, a film called The Matrix opened in movie theaters across the United States.
Twenty-seven years ago, whole audiences watched, in silence, a scene that became part of the world's language. On a stormy night, in an old room, a man named Morpheus, seated in a leather armchair, holds out both hands to Neo. In one, a blue pill. In the other, a red one. With the blue one, Neo goes back to bed, wakes up the next day and goes on believing whatever he wants to believe. With the red one, he finds out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Neo takes the red one.
And he discovers that the world he had lived in his whole life was a simulation. That his body was trapped in a pod, and his mind trapped in a dream that others had written for him.
A prison without bars
For Bairo, the film got one thing right, and another thing calls for care.
It got it right in showing that the hardest prison to see is the one without bars. Neo's had no walls and no guards in sight. It had habits, routines, certainties. He did not know he was imprisoned because he had never seen anything beyond it.
The care is with the hasty reading. Leaving the Matrix, for Bairo, is not leaving the planet. It is not fleeing the world, abandoning your family, quitting your job, going to live on a mountain. It is changing your reality, from the inside out, in the very place where you are.
Because the prison, he says, is the mind. And the bricks of that prison have names: the limitations someone told you that you had, and the fears you accepted as if they were your own. They are not the ceiling of your life. They are the floor you stand on without noticing. Whoever never looks at the floor thinks the floor is the whole world.
He knows this because he lived in one of those prisons. For years, his floor was the fear of falling again. Every decision was made standing on it, and that is why every decision was too small.
The door
There is a line of Morpheus's that Bairo likes to recall. It comes from a training scene, before Neo tries to jump from one building to another:
"I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it."
That is Morpheus, in the original script of the film.
This whole series is a door. No one walks through it for you.
The salesman's no and the entrepreneur's yes
There is a phrase that sums up how Bairo walked through the doors of his own life: the salesman's no and the entrepreneur's yes.
The salesman lives on hearing no. He hears a hundred a week. And, when he hears it, the conversation is over: he picks up his briefcase, says thank you and goes to knock on the next door. The salesman's no is a period.
The entrepreneur hears the same nos. The banks that refuse, the partners who leave, the technicians who say it can't be done. The difference is in what comes next. The entrepreneur answers with a yes that depends on no one: yes, I'll build it anyway. For him, the no is a comma.
Bairo was both. For years, he carried every no as a period. Then he learned the sentence that became the rule of his life, the one this series has repeated since the first chapter: every no is the ground of a yes. At some point, the salesman who picked up his briefcase became the entrepreneur who said yes over the refusal.
Leaving the Matrix, for him, was that. The refusal did not change. Who answered it did.
In the quantum world
He likes to say that, in the quantum world, nothing is decided ahead of time.
Here two things need to be carefully separated: what physics says, and what Bairo does with it.
Physics says this. In quantum mechanics, the theory that describes very small particles, a system such as an electron can be in a superposition of states: the theory describes it as a combination of possibilities, each with a probability. When it is measured, by an instrument, a single result appears. This has been tested in laboratories many times and holds for particles and microscopic systems. Physics does not say that a thought chooses that result, nor that anyone's mind changes the physical reality around them.
This is where physics ends. What follows is metaphor.
Bairo uses this image as a language for talking about possibility. For him, a person's future resembles that superposition: before you act, several versions of you are possible at the same time. The one who stays afraid and the one who crosses. The one who picks up the briefcase and the one who says yes. In his life, it was not the mind alone that chose between them. It was the decisions, the years of work, the nights in front of the computer. The choice does not happen in thought. It happens in the step.
It is a metaphor, and he uses it as a metaphor. But it is a metaphor that helps us remember something true: as long as you have not given up, your story is not yet decided.
Remembering the future
The first chapter of this series begins in an amusement park its creator did not live to see.
Walt Disney died before Walt Disney World opened its doors. And, on opening day, the story goes, someone lamented his absence and was told that he had seen it, yes. That is why the park was there. The story is in Fifty-five years later.
Bairo lived something similar. At rock bottom, he says, he saw his most prosperous version before it existed. A man at peace, with his life in order, building things that did not yet have names. And, when he came out of there, he did not ask to learn the way to it. He asked to remember.
Remembering something that has not happened yet sounds like a contradiction. For him, it is the definition of vision. Whoever saw it first is not inventing the future. They are remembering it, and working until the rest of the world can see it too.
The most prosperous version he remembers is not a bank balance. It is the version of someone who stopped living on top of fear. Nothing in this story is a promise of wealth, for him or for whoever reads it. It is the description of a direction.
The path and the one who walks it
The other line of Morpheus's that he keeps is said to Neo in a conversation between the two:
"Sooner or later you're going to realize, just as I did, that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path."
Those are the film's own words.
Reading a story of overcoming is knowing the path. No one changes their life because of it. They change it when they get up from the chair.
For you
You may never come to know this story, but, if you persist, you will live it.
Not this one, exactly. You will not be a Colombian immigrant, you will not open a salon, you will not hear from the banks the same no he heard. But you will live your version of it. That of someone who was trapped on a floor of fears they didn't even know they had, heard no more times than they can count, and decided, on some ordinary day, that the no would be the ground of a yes.
There is no pill in front of you. There is no shortcut, neither blue nor red. There is the same choice that existed for Neo, only without special effects: keep believing what you have always believed, or go and see how far the path goes.
Bairo chose to go and see. It took seven attempts, by his count. No one knows how many yours will take.
But your story is not yet decided. And, somewhere up ahead, there is a version of you that you have not met yet. It may be worth starting to remember it.
If you want to see your own path in the stages every hero goes through, start with The hero's journey. If you want to revisit this story from its first scene, go back to the beginning of the series.