August 20, 2003
Fiction
(by Karmayogi)
§ Apart from music,
the one thing that remains popular over the ages is story telling. It is an
entertainment that educates.
§ What holds the attention
of people is the element of education rather than its entertainment. Glenn Doman says children love to learn more than eating or even
playing.
§ Fiction is a
product of imagination.
§ Imagination is
the most powerful faculty of the mind. Sri Aurobindo says
imagination is the faculty that gives life to a future possibility. As it
brings the future into the present, it has the characteristic of conquering
Time.
§ No actual event
of history can possess human attention as fictional literature can.
§ In the field of
management, it was discovered that graduates of literature have a greater sense
of judgement. Knowledge of literature helps
accomplish subconsciously.
§ Literature is life. It easily integrates with life. So far, i.e.,
until the beginning of the twentieth century, this was true. Literature being
an intense extension of life, it finds it difficult to integrate with thought,
or any other element of Mind.
§ Thought expressed by language moves away from literature and is born
as philosophy.
§ The peaks
of literature such as Mahabharatha or
Shakespeare's plays have integrated themselves with the universal truths of
life, not thought. It is a fresh domain for
literature where it expresses ideas of Mind. It is yet to emerge.
§ Magic is a great, accomplished science. In its own field, it has
exhibited Perfection. In today's life, the magician does not occupy a respected
place. He is not admitted into life, especially social life. When admitted, he
brings up the rear. Magic has not acquired a power to accomplish in human life.
It remains a showpiece. Its effectivity in life is destructive when it becomes
black magic. Accomplishment in life is the index or watermark of the
meaningfulness of any power, mental or mechanical. Magic cannot meaningfully accomplish in life.
§ Negative
accomplishment such as the atom bomb is of no value.
§ War is a great
event, but it is negative. The war leaders all over
§ Accomplishment is
acceptable only when it is positive, wholly positive.
§ In a world where nothing
is wholly positive, literature has risen to its acme and expressed all truths
of life perfectly in a negative atmosphere. The best of Shakespearean plays are
tragedies. In the Mahabharata, to establish the rule of dharma,
§ Literature has
two great possibilities in the future:
1.
It
can express truths of thought rising one step higher from expressing truths of
life;
2.
It
can express them – the truths – positively.
§ Literature could rise to its peak before life became positive because these
truths of life are eternal and valid in the positive as well as negative
fields.
§ Science expresses
NOT truths of life, but truths of inanimate objects, the laws of matter. They
are discoveries of Mind. To express
scientific truths in fiction, literature should raise itself to the Mind or
organise itself at the level of Matter.
§ As Mind is the
next higher plane in the ascent, Matter is the next higher plane in the
descent.
§ Man's progress
has to move from 1) matter, to 2) Life, to 3) Mind, to 4) Spirit. This is the
ascent. From there begins the further progress known as descent. It moves form
Spirit to Spirit in Mind to Spirit in Life to Spirit in Matter.
§ In science fiction,
an attempt is made to express science through fiction. Initially it will be
popular but the works will be effervescent. As the evolutionary element of
science is there in fiction, it will be extremely popular, like film actors
such as Rama Rao entering
politics. It is the first muddy water of the freshes
in the river. One cannot take a bath in that water.
§ The earliest kings
all over the world were robber Barons. Genghis Khan, Caesar, Napoleon and
Alexander would not win the elections in their native lands today, nor anywhere
else. Now that the society is civilised, they have become anachronisms. But
they were great in that they established empires. Sri Aurobindo was believed to
be Napoleon in the previous birth. He called the Emperor a Rakshasa.
Stalin is believed to have killed four million people. He was a tyrant. It was
the establishment of the
§ Stalin was an
evolutionary leader.
§ In the pre-Aryan
Tamil culture which the whole of Tamilnadu now looks
up to as the golden age, a festival meant two things – liquor and meat. The
Aryan rituals were presided over by Soma and flesh, the same role now played by
drugs. That which can become an addiction has a short life in civilisation
and the cream of the society shuns it.
§
Harry Potter is extremely popular. It is
Spirituality coming to the most receptive section of the population--children,
through their idiom of magic. The evolutionary truth that lies behind it is
the validity of the Science of Life. Life is a Science. Its laws have not
yet been discovered. Humanity is becoming aware of the existence of the Science
of life as seen in the total response to Harry Potter. When the Science of Life
is accepted by Humankind, magic will no longer be negative, but Harry Potter
will not be remembered. One has to discover it for himself, as Trinity could
not explain to Neo that he was the One. Science fiction is a phase that we have
to outgrow in the march of civilisation.
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