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There’s a reason certain stories never let us go. You watch them once as a kid, and decades later you’re still quoting lines, still feeling something stir when the music swells. That’s not nostalgia. That’s recognition.
I want to look at two of the biggest science fiction universes ever made — Star Wars and Star Trek — not as competing franchises, but as two halves of a single symbolic message. One is pointing backward. One is pointing forward. And both, I’d suggest, are doing something far more important than entertaining us.
Stories as pressure valves for the collective psyche
Long before anyone typed a Star Wars script, thinkers like Carl Jung were describing something called the collective unconscious — a shared layer of the human psyche where universal patterns, or archetypes, live. Joseph Campbell built on this idea across decades of comparative mythology, arguing that myth functions as the doorway through which the deep material of a culture pours into conscious form. He described myths as operating the way dreams do for an individual — playing out, on a much larger stage, the unresolved problems of the group.
George Lucas has been completely open about the fact that Star Wars didn’t come from nowhere. He’s said plainly that the film might never have found its shape without Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which gave him the structure he’d been circling for years. Campbell later called Star Wars a valid modern myth, and the two men became friends — you can see how deliberately that mythic architecture was built into a story that, on the surface, is just about laser swords and rebels.
What’s interesting is that even the people who made the film weren’t fully conscious of what they were channeling. Composer John Williams reportedly said that until Campbell explained what Star Wars actually meant, the crew simply thought they’d made a fun Saturday-morning space movie. That’s the collective unconscious working exactly as Jung and Campbell described it — moving through people before it’s fully understood by them. Lucas also leaned into the idea that Star Wars, more than most myths, honors the essential interconnectedness of everyone involved in the story, not just the lone hero — which matters, because what’s being processed here isn’t one person’s arc. It’s ours, collectively.
An old story finding a new stage
Here’s where I want to be gentle rather than specific, because the content itself doesn’t need to be named for the point to land. Across a number of channeled and esoteric traditions, there’s a recurring theme: that somewhere far back in the story of consciousness in this part of the galaxy, there was a long stretch of conflict — control, suppression, rebellion, fear, the whole arc of oppression and the fight against it. Different sources frame the details differently, and some of those specifics are genuinely heavy to sit with. I’m not going to walk through them here. What matters for this article is the shape of the claim, not the cast of characters.
Barbara Marciniak’s channeled material is one of the more well-known versions of this idea. Her Pleiadian source material describes Earth’s early history as something contested across multiple factions, with waves of interference and disruption reaching far back before recorded history. You don’t have to take any of it as literal historical fact to notice the pattern — it’s the same shape of story that keeps surfacing across very different channeled sources, decade after decade, teacher after teacher.
And this is where Star Wars comes back in. Darryl Anka, who has channeled the entity known as Bashar for decades, has spoken directly to this idea — that Star Wars is functioning as a mirror of a real, ancient chapter of history, not a random creative invention. Framed that way, the appeal of Star Wars stops looking like coincidence. An empire. A rebellion. A struggle between control and freedom, playing out across a galaxy. It’s not hard to see why that particular shape of story would resonate with something old sitting underneath the surface of a lot of us — something that wants to be looked at, felt, and finally released, rather than repeated.
That’s the invitation, really. Not to relive the old story, but to let watching it be the completion of it. To feel the fear, the fight, the oppression flicker across the screen — and let it move through you instead of staying stuck in you.
Where the story turns toward unity
If Star Wars is the echo of where we’ve been, Star Trek is doing something almost opposite. It isn’t built around a war to survive. It’s built around a future where survival is no longer the question — where the real work is learning to actually delight in difference rather than merely tolerate it.
Gene Roddenberry gave that idea a name: IDIC, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. It became, in his son’s words, the actual backbone of the whole original series — not a footnote, not a marketing symbol, but the organizing philosophy underneath the entire franchise. Roddenberry described it as the belief that beauty, growth, and progress all come from the union of things that are unlike one another — that concord, as much as discord, needs more than one note playing at once.
He put it even more directly himself: humanity doesn’t deserve to head out into the diversity of the stars until it has learned to actually value — not just tolerate — the differences already sitting right here on Earth. That’s not a minor detail buried in an old episode. That’s the entire premise of the show, wrapped around a crew that was deliberately built to look like a working model of what Roddenberry meant.
Put the two shows side by side and the symbolism gets hard to miss. Star Wars keeps circling conflict, control, and the fight to be free of it. Star Trek keeps circling contact, curiosity, and the discovery that difference is something to explore rather than fear. One story processes what’s behind us. The other rehearses what’s ahead — a version of us that has actually integrated the lesson, instead of still fighting through it.
Why this might matter for you personally
If any of this has ever landed for you a little too intensely — if watching these stories has ever stirred something that felt older than the film itself — that’s worth paying attention to, gently and without alarm. Some people carry a particularly strong resonance with these bigger, older, galactic-scale narratives. If you’ve ever wondered whether that resonance is pointing at something real in your own makeup, it might be worth taking a few minutes with our starseed quiz to explore that a little further.
Either way, you don’t need a dramatic backstory for this to be useful. The invitation is simple: notice which of these two stories you’re more drawn to right now, and ask what that might be telling you about where you’re standing — in the processing, or already moving toward the unity on the other side of it.
A practical way to sit with this
You don’t need to overhaul your relationship with either franchise to use any of this. Next time you rewatch something from either universe, try noticing what you’re actually feeling in your body rather than just following the plot. Star Wars tends to stir tension, urgency, the pull between fighting and fleeing — that’s old material moving, and the healthiest thing you can do with it is let it move rather than suppress it or get swept back into the drama of it. Star Trek tends to stir something quieter — curiosity, ease, a kind of relief. That’s worth noticing too, because it’s a preview of the internal state this whole process is actually building toward.
Neither reaction is more spiritual than the other, and you don’t have to force yourself to prefer one over the other. If Star Wars is where you’re spending more energy right now, that’s simply where the work is. If Star Trek is what you keep gravitating to, that may be a sign that some of the older material has already loosened its grip. Either way, the fact that these stories keep pulling at billions of people, decade after decade, generation after generation, tells you something significant is moving through the collective — whether or not any one viewer consciously realizes it.
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