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Both Gnosticism and Buddhism believe that when spiritually awakened individuals die, they will leave the material world behind. After death, a Gnostic will ascend to the pleroma, a plane of spiritual, non-material existence, and an enlightened Buddhist achieves nirvana, a non-material state that can not be described in words (Flannery-Dailey and Wagner ¶37). However, when humans are freed from the Matrix, they enter the material world where machines harvest humans for energy, and the freed humans use technology to battle the sentinels. Therefore, the world a Gnostic or Buddhist ascends to after death is completely different than the material world where a person freed from the Matrix awakens to. In the Matrix universe, one who is freed from the Matrix still has to join the human resistance and battle the machines, whereas a Gnostic or Buddhist who is awakened looks forward to a wonderful afterlife.

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