The Hidden Spirituality of Interstellar

Ahhh, interstellar, a simple classic movie, about a farmer his family Some dust and a transdimensional interstellar quantum gravitational space travel.

Seriously! 

So the basis of this movie is that in the future, the earth has become a global dustbowl due to humanity being excessive. It’s mostly a commentary on monoculture farming, which we’ve explored in our food series. Primarily by farming the same thing on the same land over and over, you lose the majority of your nutrient base due to lack of plant diversity. You also lose your root system, making it easy for winds to pick up dirt and throw it for miles and miles. Interstellar begins with a warning - if we continue living the way we are, this could be our world. 

So the film introduces us to our main characters, Cooper, or Coop for short, and his daughter Murph. Now, there’s an interesting thing in these opening scenes, where we see Murph's teacher talking to Coop about his daughter's progress in school. She remarks about how the moon landings were fake. They were entirely propaganda to fool the Soviets into pouring their resources into the space program so that the Americans could gain an advantage in the war. 

It’s so exciting seeing a Hollywood movie talk about this, because of course, if you google this, there are massive conspiracies today that say the moon landing was faked. Then again, we also have ex NASA officers and astronauts who publicly have said: “Yeah, we went up there and met a bunch of aliens and it was so crazy that NASA hid it from the world, and never went back.” You can learn more about that in our Sumerian Epic series. Ultimately, you’re going to have to decide for yourself on this one, but still interesting that we even see it mentioned in Hollywood! 

Now, in many storylines today, we see this narrative of the hero’s journey, which often begins with a call to adventure. Interstellar features this through these strange gravitational anomalies vibrating morse code patterns in Murph's bedroom, which Coop and Murph translate to be co-ordinated to a nearby location. They make their way there and find none other than Nasa. 

In this movie, Nasa is a driving force of the plot, providing the technology and the plans to execute a journey into a magical wormhole way out near Saturn. Now, I’m not here to get into the drama and conspiracies against or for Nasa, though yes, these things exist out on the internet. Curiously, we find a spiritual lesson about this in the film itself, and we’ll come back to that soon.

In these scenes, we see the opposing mentality of the many vs. The few. Mostly, everyone these days are just concerned with farming, they’re focused on survival and just getting enough to make it through to the next season, even though their crops are slowly growing smaller and smaller. The few, on the other hand, such as Coop, exclaim, “we used to be pioneers, explorers, adventurers… not just trying to survive”. And this becomes a question we can personally ask ourselves are we pushing the boundaries of what we know, or are we just trying to get by in life?

So upon the discovery of Nasa, we learn about this wormhole, a link through the spacetime into another galaxy, where there might just be a way to save their dying species. So Coop, Anne Hathaway, and two other characters who don’t make it to the end all get in a rocketship and blast into the universe to save the human race. Bringing with them, some unique and friendly robots, and a bunch of test-tube humans that they plan on growing somewhere, and they intend that if they can, maybe they can even transport some people there.

Perhaps one of the most fundamental hidden spiritual truths of this movie is that the deeper you get into science, into the unknown, into the universe, the more mystical reality gets. We see this with the wormhole itself. The funny thing about the wormhole, though, is that it was produced using the mathematics of an actual wormhole according to General Relativity! The visual fx artists worked with renowned Physicist, Kip Thorne, and used a mathematical representation of a massive black hole, then plugged it into their VFX generator, and this is what it turned into! They even produced a scientific paper about it. So this is an actual wormhole simulation, not just a fancy visual effect.

Now, maybe this is just me - but watching the sequence of going through the wormhole felt to me like my mind was expanding. Like reality was being stretched, like more was possible than it was before. It feels to me like this was an encoded message for the audience watching the movie, implanting within us this idea of what it looks and feels like to perceive spacetime differently, getting us ready for our transcendent evolution of consciousness. 

Now, on the other side of the wormhole, they have three planets to visit in hopes of finding a new home for the human race. Their first guess takes them on a short trip to Waterworld, where they go surfing and chilling in the shallow side for the equivalent time of 23 earth years. It doesn’t go so well, and returning to their ship, they’re limited on fuel. So there’s this moment where they have to decide on which of the two planets to visit next, and they better pick well.

So it’s revealed that Dr. Hathaway is in love with one of the astronauts on one of the nearby worlds, Dr. Edmund. And there’s this very rousing speech from her about following our hearts., that love is powerful - it has to mean something. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that can transcend the dimensions of time and space. It’s an overall very moving and emotional scene, and it might even make you cry.

Now, this IS Hollywood, so OF COURSE, the man immediately takes control of the situation and steers directly towards the other guy. The legendary, the one, the only Dr. Mann. 

I gave him a little hype just now because this is how Dr. Mann is portrayed in this film. He is a legend; he is the best of the best; he was the one who brought everyone together and made this mission possible And then, well, this happened.

Dr. Mann is a personification of the ordinary human consciousness and our ego. I mean, his name is Mann. He is the one who could create miraculous things, but watch how quickly that personality can turn when it is filled with fear, dread, and isolation. This is what happened with Dr. Mann - He was isolated, stranded alone on a frozen planet with nobody else for the rest of his eternity. The last time he went into cryosleep, he didn’t even set wake-up time. This isolation and the fear of not surviving caused him to lie, caused him to tell people to come to his planet because it was the one. It caused him to betray his comrades, and in arrogant defiance to the truth - got himself killed. A valuable lesson for all of us doesn’t arrogantly defy the reality, or you shall suffer horrific karmic repercussions. 

With the power of persistence, determination, and undying faith in the universe and himself, coop successfully reconnects his ship to the space dock even with it exploded and spinning like mad. Herein lies another secret lesson - if we set our hearts upon doing something, and we do it well, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish! 

Okay, let’s pause for a moment and reflect briefly on the events back on earth. Throughout the film, it is slowly revealed that the head of Nasa has been lying. Coop's daughter noticed that it looked like he was doing equations with two hands tied behind his back. Then it was revealed that he knew a long time ago that it would be impossible to save the human race by using science to negate gravity and lifting off into a super space station. He could not reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. Still, he convinced everyone that it was possible, and he was working on it - so that people would work on the technology and carry out the mission. 

THIS is the key to the whole Nasa conspiracy thing that we mentioned earlier. Because look - there is some evidence and speculation that NASA is hiding something, but instead of throwing shade, the film reminds us this valuable lesson that even the people who are behind NASA and other giant organizations are just that - people, subject to human desires and emotions, the positive and the negative, and are easily influenced to do things, such as lie or create deceptions, out of their fears and insecurities. The Nasa chief in the movie wasn’t able to see beyond the solution to his formula, he couldn’t conceive of a quantum interdimensional answer, probably because there was nowhere for him to go and take Ayahuasca. So he fooled everyone in a way that he believed was safe. 

Jumping back to another galaxy and another timeline, Coop’s new plan is to slingshot them around the wormhole and over to their last remaining planet where maybe they’ve got a shot at growing some modern humans. In the process, coop sacrifices their robot and himself to make it happen. In a scene of great wisdom, Cooper says, “to get ahead mankind has always had to give something back/let something go,” and in this case - it was him. Honestly, this was a scene of tremendous bravery and courage to let oneself die to save their species. 

And this is where Interstellar becomes a mystery school for us all. Cooper falls into a massive sphere inside the black hole, which then becomes these tunnels of lines, revealed to be pockets of time. On the other side of his tracks is his daughter's bookshelf, and he connects through his radio with Tarz, his robot buddy, also trapped inside this wormhole - who explains that he is inside a three-dimensional manifestation of a 5th-dimensional timeline. It’s time represented as a physical dimension, and Cooper can manipulate gravity from inside this time matrix because gravity is the only thing besides love that can go forwards and backward in time. 

Cooper realizes that the gravitational anomalies that he saw at the beginning of the movie were him all along, giving himself messages from the future. He realized that the whole time he was thinking, “wow, it was THEM who have been helping us along,” alluding to some alien species. Still, honestly, that “them” was us - it was the evolved human consciousness that became 5th-dimensional beings through conscious evolution. It sent gravitational anomalies through time to help humanity grow in the first place. 

What’s especially surprising about this is that that’s EXACTLY what the channeler Bashar has been saying in his channelings for years. That who he is channeling is himself from the future who, along with the rest of humanity, has evolved to higher consciousness, and he’s sending back information from the future about human evolution and how to make it happen. 

Now, here’s a fun question that the movie will not even get into…. Why did the wormhole bring him THERE? Why that moment in time? Why that location? Well, in the bigger picture of the story, it’s because his daughter was the genius who could finish the mission and get quantum gravity liftoff to their earth-tech and save humanity. However, that’s only half the reason. The other half is because of something Dr. Mann said. When you’re about to die, you push a little farther to connect with your family and live longer.” The reason he went to the bookshelf was probably just as much because that’s what his subconscious manifested for him. After all, his loved ones were what he wanted most in life. Much of his driving actions in this film were because of his love for his children. Embodying the true spirit of the word Husbandry - the original meaning of which speaks to the nurturing and supporting of everything around the masculine father figure. This film asks us - what is it we truly care most about in our heart of hearts? And to dig deep into ourselves and find out what lights us up inside. 

So Cooper transmits the quantum data to his daughter through time using morse code, and then he disappears into the void and wakes up in a hospital bed. A very long time has passed since he first left home, and his daughter is now an older woman on her deathbed. But Plan A is now fulfilled, using the data Cooper was able to send through the wormhole, young Murph was able to solve the gravitational propulsion problem to get Plan A, and the massive space station where Cooper awakens, out in space.

In an absolute heart-shattering scene, she tells him to leave her, she’ll be with her new family now, and that he should be with Anne Hathaway, and start a new life on a new planet and raise a new generation of humans on a new world. I’m sorry, this whole scene made me cry. 

And so, that’s what Cooper does, bringing this film to an end. But the hidden spiritual meaning here goes on. See, the foundational message of Interstellar is not what most people think - the most excellent idea conveyed here is that of human evolution. That one day, we will evolve into a higher dimensional species, capable of perceiving time fundamentally different than we are today. 

However, it will take some time to get there, and it’s up to us to make it happen. Interstellar warns us - we have to learn the lessons of caring and nurturing for each other and our world if we want to have a world to live on at all. We very well could destroy ourselves with our greed and excess. In other words, we must check ourselves before we wreck ourselves.

One thing Interstellar does make us feel this message takes us through large jumps in time. After Coop’s relatively short visit to the water planet (where he’s there for only several hours), the audience and Coop see both their astronaut comrade and young Murph age by 23 years. After he emerges from the black hole at the end of the film, his daughter is an older woman. These events show us viscerally that time is always passing, and compels the audience to make the most of what time they have, and show us the deep pain of missing out if we don’t seize the day, every day!.

But there is an even deeper message from this - because also if humanity destroys itself, even if we are pushed to the very brink of destruction, we can ALWAYS find our way back. All that it takes is unshakeable faith, love, and determination to see it through and do the things that are both scary and exciting. 

So get out there and evolve into a multidimensional being! 

Make sure to let us know what else you’d like to see a Hidden Spirituality about, and we’ll be sure to cover it soon! Peace out, and lots of love!