Yoda, the Matrix, Spiderman, and Batman. Why has our popular culture become so permeated with the quest for super powerful heroes? Do our imaginations know something our conscious minds don’t? The Dark Side and the Light. Can Pop Culture predict the future? Does the truth about the future of humanity lie hidden in the epic struggles of comic book heroes or in Super Hero Movie blockbusters? Is there a Secret to Life?
I ask because its essence has infused our culture, producing a yearning for something more powerful, more liberating. Since the 1940s, Hollywood has featured movies in which people:
- Come back from the dead to instruct the living (Ghost, Heaven Can Wait);
- Have guardian angels (It’s a Wonderful Life, Topper, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, The Bishop’s Wife);
- Acquire super magical powers (Star Wars, Superman, The Matrix, X-Men).
If they do it in the movies, if it’s seeped into our consciousness to such an extent, surely there must be something to it. Doesn’t fiction usually foretell reality? Is not actuality rooted in dreams? If there’s nothing to it, then why has so much time and money been spent stimulating our imagination? Why do we spend so much time on stories and fables about the acquisition of extraordinary faculties? Quite simply, because there’s a large body of experience in fact and fiction built up around the acquisition of such faculties.
We shouldn’t be indignant with Hollywood. The purveyors of dreams — pop culture trendsetters and advertising wags, writers and storytellers — are merely channeling the phenomenon of unconscious or collective yearning. What is unconscious yearning?
Unconsciously, we have always yearned for higher states. Our Popular Culture has given us Avatars to aspire to: Batman, Superman, The Hulk, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Daredevil, Spiderman. Heck, Robert Louis Stevenson's best-selling work, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), was little more than a veiled Kundalini awakening gone awry.
These Avatars spring from the depths of our creative imagination, even to the point as to lay out a blueprint, in storyboard form, for our transition to a new state of being. That the blueprint should be interpreted by the viewer’s subconscious as something fearful is only normal. Evolution does not come easy. As Mikhail Turovsky said, “The first ape who became a man thus committed treason against his own kind.”
Yet human potential is limitless and our subconscious mind knows it. Where does the subconscious mind get its information? From time to time, the Kundalini, dormant in most of us, nudges our subconscious. Some of these contents come to us in the form of dreams and inspirations of various sorts. Whatever the source these contents are not mere figments, but the signs of a deeper reality, one constantly beckoning to us.