Joe Rogan speaking with Jason Silva, Duncan Trussell and Ari Shaffir about an article by Erik Davis where he's talking about DesCartes and the Matrix and the False-Reality Genre of film making

Jason:  You know the scene in the Matrix when he's in the hotel room and they're about to give him the pill?

Duncan: Yes

Ari: Yea

Jason:  Ok, that's the craziest part of the movie.  So he says: 

We too are in that decrepit hotel room with Lawrence Fishburn's Morpheus, who is really speaking to us when he addresses Neo, the ever-wooden Keanu Reeves: 

You know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, [driving you mad].
Establishing the itch -- which I suppose most of us share, however we interpret it -- Morpheus offers to scratch. He will give Neo "nothing more" than knowledge of the truth (ie, no solution to the problems posed by the truth).

And then he goes on and he says:

So like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, [which the Nag Hammadi codex "The Secret Book of John" claims was a liberating Christ in disguise], Morpheus offers Neo a pill. Neo, of course, swallows the molecular package, which is really the most heroic act in the film. For Neo must then pass [face] his own Cartesian "passage through madness," melting into a mirror that alludes not only to Lewis Carroll but to the mystic-psychotic collapse and disappearance of the externalized ego that stabilizes our inner void. As Neo phases out of the Matrix, he opens up, however briefly, the fractured bardo that is the secret thrill of every fan of the "false reality" genre: the moment when baseline reality dissolves but no new reality [world] has yet emerged in its pixelating wake.

Duncan:  Wow, cool.  That's great man.  That's trippy

Episode #369 of The JRE podcast @ -42:40