Over the past few years, as I have been watching movies and paying more & more attention to their core messages, an interesting thought has emerged where I have started to see core concepts of Sanatan Dharma (referred commonly as Hinduism) linked to many movies…
Here I try to speak about 5 of them…
Interstellar
What is the idea that propels the plot? That there is a universal super-consciousness that transcends time and space, and in which all human life is connected – and it has been around for thousands of years.
It is Vedic.
When the film’s astronaut hero (Matthew McConaughey), declares that the mysterious and all-knowing “they”, who created a wormhole near Saturn through which he travels to save mankind – dissolving his sense of material reality in the process, are in fact “us”, he is simply repeating the central notion of the Upanishads, India’s oldest philosophical texts. These hold that individual human minds are merely brief reflections within a cosmic one – “Aham Brahmasmi”.
Matrix – Look at the Matrix movies – the core plotpoint is that this world is an illusion. It’s about maya – that if we can cut through the illusions and connect with something larger we can do all sorts of seemingly ‘superhuman’ things in this world of maya. Neo achieves abilities that many yogis have in the past. As described by Paramahansa Yogananda – “they can defy the laws of observed reality”, also aligned with the concept of people achieving ‘siddhis’ in Hinduism.
Star Wars – It was the film, with its cosmic scale and theme of a universal and undying “Force” that exists in & around all things and enables living beings to align themselves with it.
This eternalisation is the closest definition of the concept of ‘sanatani’ that one can think of – eternal, undying and all-pervasive.
By the way – there is also a term for this force in Bharatiya language – it’s called ‘chaitanya’. Every living thing has ‘chaitanya’ in them.
IMO Star Wars opened up the world to Indian esotericism more than anything else, albeit wrapped in a shroud of fantasy. George Lucas has written multiple times that he was influenced by the mythologist Joseph Campbell & his work – A Hero With a Thousand Faces and traced the narrative arc common to all mythic heroes that Luke Skywalker would embark upon.
Campbell himself has written and said multiple times that his ‘hero’ in the book he wrote lived by his Upanishadic mantra “follow your bliss”, which he explains as having derived from the Sanskrit term sat-chit-ananda.
The word sat means being,” said Campbell. “Chit means consciousness. Ananda means bliss or rapture. I thought, ‘I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not. I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not, but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being’.” His mantra was the paradigm for Skywalker’s own realisation of the force, the sense of peace, purpose and power gained once he allowed himself to accept and unify with it. “If you follow your bliss,” wrote Campbell, “you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”
As his mastery of the force neared its peak, Skywalker comes perilously close to taking Vader’s sinister path. With this, Star Wars delves deeply into Natyashastra and the rasa theory which has no concept of ‘villainy’ but just two type of bravery – the positive bravery (Veer ras) and negative bravery (Raudra ras), with the former being followers of dharma and the latter those who don’t follow dharma (and hence follow adharma). This establishes the principle of (super)heroes having to overcome an inner darkness while battling an external enemy, and finding an enlightenment in the process.
Inception – Christopher Nolan’s Inception reinterprets Indian philosophical concepts through a cinematic lens, particularly the notion of time dilation within nested dream levels. The movie postulates that as one delves deeper into these dream levels, the perception of time stretches exponentially, distancing the mind from reality. This idea resonates strongly with Hindu temporal units, presenting an intriguing analogy. The narrative suggests that our perceived life is merely a dream, a product of our divine self’s slumber. Consequently, we forget our true origins and mistake this dream-like existence for reality, leading to recurring cycles of suffering. Thus, Inception’s labyrinth of dreams and its manipulation of time remarkably parallels key elements of Hindu philosophy, infusing the film with profound metaphysical insights.
The Avatar series: The title itself, “Avatar,” is derived from the Sanskrit word for incarnation. The film draws parallels with Sanatani concepts of nature worship & divine incarnations.