The 2014 film ‘Interstellar’ tells the story of a future in which the Earth has become virtually uninhabitable for humans due to exhaustion.
A group of astronauts is therefore looking for another habitable planet. In a dialogue where the further course of the spacecraft must be determined, some of the astronauts oppose each other in their views. Part of the discussion is the meaning of the phenomenon of love.
The first character believes that love is mainly a result of the evolutionary course of humankind because social bonds increase the chance of survival. A tribe simply has a better chance of survival than an individual. The other character counters that love was not invented by humans and has more meaning than just evolutionary utility. She notes,
Maybe it means more than that, something we can’t understand yet. Perhaps it is a clue to the existence of a higher dimension that we cannot consciously perceive. Love is the only thing we can perceive that transcends the dimensions of time and space. Perhaps we should trust that power, even if we cannot understand it.
The dialogue makes me think that, apparently, different conceptions of love are possible, or maybe there are even several kinds of love. While the first character sees love as merely a biological function, the second seems to understand love as a greater universal force that “transcends the dimensions of time and space.” The continuation – “perhaps we should trust that power, even if we cannot understand it” – evokes the association that this power has a wisdom of its own, and in that wisdom, it also knows a plan, a direction and a goal.
Human beings naturally need connection with others and the world around them. And in the connection with others, man is capable of great things. What a power of creation humanity has when it works together, and what a power of destruction when it fights against itself. In concrete reality, this is visible, for example, in the immense destruction caused by war on the one hand, and on the other – when people work together – an orchestra that, as a whole group, in the performance of a symphony, creates beauty. A creation by people who are alike in making music, for example, can lift a corner of the veil of unity. Yet this experience of unity must also ebb away because it is bound by the laws of our ever-changing world, where nothing is permanent.
In the world of Light, imperishable Oneness does exist, because this field is not bound by the laws of our dualistic world as we know it. In logion 22b of the Gospel of Thomas, this world of Light is called “the Kingdom”:
When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the Kingdom.
Becoming aware of the Oneness, ‘entering into the Kingdom’ changes us and has a positive effect on our connection with the world around us. What is the point of erecting walls or accusing someone else, when you know that you are the other person in your deepest being? When one person is touched by the Light, the consciousness of humanity as a whole changes with it because we are all connected by invisible threads. These invisible threads converge in the One Love that waits to be found in the heart of every human being.
