Passengers

Yesterday, while traveling on the flight, I watched a movie named Passengers. The movie is about human beings transported to a different planet in a spaceship. Since they will take around 200 years to reach the planet hence, they have been kept in a hibernated mode where their aging stops. The idea is that a few months before these human beings are about to reach the new planer, all of them including the crew will wake up from hibernation. Incidentally, one of the machines malfunctions, and one of the human beings wakes up from hibernation. There is nobody on the ship to assist him and all the human beings including the crew are in hibernation.

He starts getting depressed as days pass since he realizes that he is soon going to die before the ship reaches the planet since it is another 90 years to reach the planet. He wakes up one lady out of the frustration from hibernation and they both fall in love. Later the lady realizes that the man woke him up from hibernation and becomes quite angry with the fact. She tries to kill that man but is somehow unable to do so even if there is no defense by the man while being attacked. Slowly they realize that the ship has certain major technical glitches and they both together repair the ship. In the process, they come to know there is one machine that can hibernate human beings. However, they both decide to be with each other and live their life on the ship and die by the time other human beings wake up from hibernation.

A very interesting aspect of human life. What do we live for? What is love? We have many ambitions and we keep running after these ambitions, from one to the other. Is that because we do not have love in our life? What made the actors in the movie leave their ambition to reach the new planet? It was very painful for the man to reconcile with the fact that his ambition had been crushed because of the technical glitch in the ship. He tried whatever he could have done and yet could not find any way to get back to the earth or new planet or go back to hibernation. It was equally painful for the lady to realize that her dream to reach the new planet had been broken by the man. 

Both of them were desperate and depressed till the time they reconciled to the fact of life. However, the moment they reconciled to the fact, they started living life with love to the extent that they decided to let go of their dreams in order to live life. It was an extreme situation wherein only one of them could have fulfilled his dream. I am very sure that had there been two machines, both of them would have decided to get hibernated, the way we keep running after the ambitions. This world is full of ambitions, and we keep running after them never living our lives.

I understand that there are two "selves" that we carry each time with us. There is a physical self or the physical body and the other is the social self that we have built on the top of the physical self. This social self is the creation of the society and culture, we are born and brought up with. The social self keeps interacting with the physical self. For example, as we grow up, parents praise us when we do something that they like. There is a smile on their face every time we do something that pleases them. We too mirror the same smile on our faces. That is how the social self is programmed to keep doing something or other that is appreciated by society. 

Our motivations and ambitions are decided by the physical self and the social self. Some of these aim at pleasing the physical self. For example, eating tasty food, having a massage at the parlor, having comfortable furniture, a home with a comfortable bed, and going to a resort to relax the body. On the other hand, most of our motivations and ambitions are the product of the social self. For example, being number one in the organization, gathering power, becoming famous, developing a multi-million business empire, and so on. However, each of these ambitions has an underlying linkage with the physical self, most of which are unconscious roots whereof lie in our social conditioning. 

The crux of our existence is how we perceive what we are. This identification of "I" is very crucial and decides almost all our ambitions. Some of us remain more identified with our bodies and keep seeking different pleasures. Restaurant after restaurant, parlor after parlor, comfort after comfort, their journey is never-ending. The more comfort they get in their life, the more their threshold to tolerate pain reduces and they become more and more restless to reach their default state of comfort. The people who have got used to air conditioning find it very difficult to stay in the scorching sun. People who have got used to luxury cars find it very difficult to travel by public transport. 

Similarly, some people identify more with their social self. They take great pains to fulfill the ambitions set by their social self. History is full of people who have put their lives at stake in order to gather power by fighting battles. Almost all of us spend a considerable amount of time in our lives to keep other people happy. We socialize with many people whom we do not gel with. We keep listening to the bosses even when we are not convinced of what they say. We sometimes make a lot of compromises in order to continue certain relationships. Thus either we set ambitions in terms of getting approval from the society or to dominate the society. 

I feel that the most crucial factor in the spiritual evolution is the awareness of the reality. The less we remain aware of reality, the more we get obsessed with a particular ambition or motivation. There is no harm with the ambitions. However, fixation and obsession with them are definitely harmful at least on two counts. Firstly, such fixations make us limited and fragile. We become very fearful of losing what we identify with. The powerful become very fearful of losing power, and the famous become very fragile due to the fear of being disapproved by society. Secondly, we lose touch with love and compassion. We become so narrow in our worldview that we lack compassion for others. We bully them deliberately in order to hide our own fixations and fears. We hide more and more due to fears of being judged and in the process become more and more pretentious and artificial. Recently, I had an opportunity to see through many such personalities full of fears, aggression, bullying, and pretensions. We can see through the perverted personalities and fear inside. 

Probably, living life is very simple if we just be attentive to what we are. It requires a lot of courage to see ourselves naked. It's not easy to take off the clothes of our opinions, beliefs, social image, biases, etc. These clothes give us a lot of comfort. But this comfort slowly turns into pain. We get so used to this comfort that we lose touch with the reality. When we start examining our own social self, we realize that most of it is redundant. As we examine the redundant automatically gets dropped creating space for the new. That is growth. Identification and fixation with the known is narrowness which slowly turns into death. Openness is life. Openness comes with the awareness of the reality. As we grow more and more aware, all our fixations and identifications drop automatically because all these fixations and identifications are nothing but the result of a lack of awareness.