I was 25, and watched the film alone at Sterling Cinema in South Mumbai. It was that sort of a film; you remember details. As the fourth instalment of The Matrix releases now, many years after the trilogy was completed, let me remind you that in 1999, The Matrix was a global spiritual experience. I have met people who have missed its entire subtext and who think it was just a confusing greenish sci-fi film, but they are very few.

Before I walked into Sterling, I had not read a word about the film. So, a few minutes in, I was stunned. Or consumed by a great spiritual smugness. You see, the film was about me.

At 17, I was Neo in Madras; there was even a Morpheus. What happened was, one day, when a friend and I were alone in a big house something significant occurred. He started looking weird. Then he told me nothing is as it appears; there is something else out there. I got it immediately.

We were not so cool as the characters in The Matrix only because we were tropical, and did not require so many layers of black clothes. In fact, my Morpheus and I arrived at the theory that it is hard for people in cold nations to attain enlightenment because they are forever in the frivolous self-regard of excess costumes.

In Sterling Cinema, I thought that only I and very few people knew that the world around us is just a simulation, and that there was a way to find the truth. I was a bit surprised that Americans knew this too, but I was confident they were also very few. I thought most people will not get the film. They were, after all, like the extras in Matrix, too deep in the simulation to see the outer halos of reality. But then, in the coming days, I realized that everyone got it. I was very annoyed and disappointed. Everyone got it? That easy?

Even so, I discovered, there were two kinds of people. A majority who knew the theory of spiritual awakening, and those who had a closer experience with it because of a certain mental state, mental disorder, sorrow or drugs. People who want to believe in an alternate reality are people who do not enjoy the original reality.

The idea that the observable physical world is not real has corroboration in religion and other stories. And even in some theories postulated by scientists, which are often misconstrued as scientific theories. But the first three Matrix films were a corroboration at unprecedented scale and its impact was deep because it was not a farcical film. Even though it was made by the persuasions of mainstream entertainment, it was unafraid of complexity. It was a film that was prepared to fail.

The true power of spirituality, or philosophy, which is often spirituality for atheists, is in the vagueness of its meaning. As a result, it allows people to misunderstand its creators and messages. Misrepresentation is how people project their own character on to something else, and start admiring that thing without realizing that they are only loving themselves. The film gained from this, as people attributed their own meanings to its many allusions.

The Matrix is about our quest for something better. The film could have followed the formula laid out by all religion: Show truth as a paradise, something infinitely better than what a prophet persuades people to flee. But in The Matrix, the real world is impoverished, tough and grim. All it has going for it is that it is real. That is the films greatness. It showed truth need not be utopia.

The most convincing idea of the film is its argument that when people have to choose between an unreal paradise and a very real hell, many will pick the unreal paradise. But then there will be some who will choose truth above everything untrue.

Not all ideas in The Matrix are spiritual, or even philosophical. It hints at phenomena that happen in the real world known to us but do not always see. In the film, the matrix is a computer simulation created by advanced machines that have taken over the world. It has inbuilt flaws that allow the rise of human rebels and even rogue programmes. To that end, the matrix is a lot like capitalism. Every time it creates an affluent paradise, people grow disenchanted, they long for conflict, and humanitarians from well-off families arisebeneficiaries of inequality who wage a moral war against inequality. Thus it was not unnatural that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels hailed from affluent families. And that after them, generations of academics and writers who called themselves Marxists were usually from wealthy families.

There is a scene in the second edition of The Matrix, where our hero, Neo, meets The Architect, the computer programme that has created the matrix. Neo, who is leading the human revolution against the machines, wants to know, Why am I here?" The Architect gives a tangential answer, You are the eventuality of an anomaly"

It is the same in real life. All our heroes who lead the war against capitalism, too, are creations of the very system they wish to dismantle. Their job is not to destroy capitalism because they cannot. Their job is merely to manufacture the hope that capitalism can indeed be destroyed. By promoting mediocre foes, capitalism ensures more threatening enemies never rise.

Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, Decoupled

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How The Matrix was a massive spiritual experience - Mint