My Favourite Stories - Part 11: Neon Genesis Evangelion

At this point it should be no surprise that I have an affinity for sci-fi stories with deep religious themes. Neon Genesis Evangelion is the ultimate marriage between thrilling science fiction and profound spirituality. I can say that it is a story which I’ve only grown more and more attached to as I’ve gotten older, and especially after my ayahuasca trip.

I have to start with the caveat that it is a tough show to watch. The sparse moments of joy the characters find are heavily overshadowed by the fact that everyone appears to be stuck in a Freudian psycho-sexual nightmare. As a result, I find it almost impossible to explain why I love this show without making people deeply concerned for my mental well-being.

The show is also very much a love story to early psychology. It takes foundational psychological principles and represents them in fascinating symbolic ways. For example, the Eva robots are equipped with powerful defence mechanisms known as ‘A.T. Fields’. Later on, it is revealed that this ability is rooted in the human ego, which has an innate desire to defend itself from anything which is not itself.

It takes time to get to this gold, however. At the start, Evangelion appears to just be a show about massive robots battling aliens. As it progresses, however, the religious metanarrative becomes more apparent. It borrows from Hebrew mysticism, creating a lore of humanity being millions of fragmented pieces of an ancient being. 

Towards the end of the show, everything unravels at the seams. Characters have their deepest neuroses exposed, along with the ineffective coping mechanism they use to try to simply survive themselves. Shinji’s habit of running away and isolating himself, Asuka’s constant need to prove herself, Misato escaping in sexual pleasure with her boyfriend, and Gendo’s mission to reunite all of humanity into its original singularity through the human instrumentality project.

Furthermore, the movie sequel The End of Evangelion is the perfect expansion on the show’s conclusion. I still get chills when listening to the song ‘Komm, Susser Todd’ which plays as the human instrumentality project takes place and we witness the whole human race being melted down into the single, divine organism that it came from. It is a beautiful, chilling soundtrack which serves as the anthem for the subconscious yearning for death, the ultimate release of all mortal suffering.

In spite of all the misery plaguing the characters, I feel that Evangelion still has a happy ending. Underpinning all this knife-twisting is a deeply life-affirming message. 

Even after experiencing the bliss of death, Shinji rejects instrumentality and returns to an individual consciousness. This displays his acceptance that humans cannot escape the chronic feeling of loneliness that is symptomatic of being a solitary ego. He realizes this great cosmic tragedy that nobody will ever fully understand him or know him the way he knows himself, until the day he dies. He becomes aware of this inevitable suffering which can only be accepted and never escaped, and he embraces it by returning to individual human form.

I think this is the greatest form of courage anyone can possibly embody. To know that existence is suffering, and yet welcome it all the same as something worth experiencing.