Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.
– The Matrix, about 1:11 in
Neo: What truth?
Boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Boy: Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
As so often, there is some truth to this and it’s easy to misunderstand.
This is not about bending spoons. It’s about realizing what we are.
What are we in our own first person experience? What are we if we are honest with ourselves, and set aside what others have told us we are?
We may find that in our own experience, we are capacity for the world. We are what our field of experience happens within and as.
There is a spoon in a conventional sense. And when we notice what we are, we also realize that the spoon is not what we thought. It happens within and as what we are. Any boundaries and labels come from our own mental representations and are not inherent in what they appear to be about.
Since the spoon happens within and as what we are, if the spoon bends, we are the bending.
In the movie, this is about bending spoons as a way to discover and explore how the matrix is created by the mind. For us, it’s about noticing what we are.
Noticing what we are doesn’t give us any special powers. It’s about noticing what we already are, and if we continue to notice, it’s about our human self transforming within that noticing.
It may seem that it gives us something. But it ultimately doesn’t give us anything. What we notice is that we are not anything in particular within our field of experience. There isn’t any separate one to gain anything.
Also, the process of transformation is, as Adya says, a destructive process. It’s not really what our personality wants.