There is the sequence of names which bothers me. Saint-Exupéry, Richard Bach, Hermann Hesse, Paulo Coelho…the writers that managed to smuggle ‘eternal questions’ as a bookstore blockbusters. People who more less still fascinate the average reader and provide the sense of awe, miracle, inner calling, fatality, divine coincidences two-three hours a day and until you finish the book. It takes at most a week or two afterwards for all that higher state of mind to wear off and you’re back to good old self.
I was startled by a curious fact. For a few of them I thought they wrote some great works back in the day when I was young and able, but I changed my mind – in retrospective and without even rereading them. Not because someone convinced me otherwise, or because I had a brainstorming session on how all this literary spirituality doesn’t really work. It was a spontaneous by-product of growing-up. As if the effect such writers were aiming for was strictly biologically conditioned. It works between 16 to 20 years of age and not a day more.
In my case. But, now as I’m trying to figure out what’s exactly wrong with that genre, several things spring up in my mind. I’m not talking about the authors that flood the market with their 10-steps-to-god-or-how-to-discover-your-divine-nature self-help crap, tailored to sell millions and ensure that their grandchildren will drive SUVs and splash around in their private swimming pools as much as them. That’s not literature. It belongs to a shelf with washing-machine and microwave manuals. On the other hand, Coelho and aforementioned gang are considered writers, artists, people who are or were eligible for a Nobel prize in literature. The aspect which exactly makes their work a failure. In my view.
You cannot do a spiritual art. It’s a pleonasm. Either you write spiritually, then you don’t do art, you write a new new testament or something. Or you do art, to which you can’t attach a set of spiritual premises or intentions, because the art explodes from its own inspiration, its own independent origin, its own way of creating world. It’s inherently spiritual. Why vast majority of ritual, sacred, or in the case of the West, a christian art hasn’t much of an artistic value? Because it cheats in the first step. It uses the tools, it takes the form, but it lacks the primary movement, the first ring of chain which distinguishes it from artisanship. A ring which binds it to a fuzzy vision, a dark core of something born ex nihilo, a premonition of certain glory, a structure, a sensation, which doesn’t have a name and can’t be quoted from the pool of wisdom.
What do you get in Little Prince, Alchemist, Siddharta? An event, experience, happening, a spiritual excess turned into imagination. Into a story. Maybe that’s why Bible never really worked. There were too many parables, too many images, too many characters. So we all ended up reading it and storing in into a cultural memory, in a tradition, in a set of sayings, maxims, in a way to build our collective identities, as we missed on partaking in the reality that happened in the first place.
It sounds pretentious, but I dare to say that an imagination is the greatest killer of any kind of enlightening, of shattering encounter with realities that surpass us, if there are any. Apart from transposing what should’ve been the event to the level of fiction, it always surrounds spiritual with a sense of exception. It’s supposed to happen to someone far, someone exquisite, someone chosen. Such distance auguments our reading impression, it helps us to sink into the fable, and practically destroys any transformative potential of the text.
I don’t know how people actually change. Or do they change at all. But if there is a higher state of mind it comes as a shock and it works as a total experience. It’s not a poetical superstructure, a neverland of great people and great ideas, a pleasant and instructive world that we engage in from time to time, a thing which we are able to like and learn from. I guess that’s why all Coelhos, Bachs and Hesses fall from people’s hearts and memories as dead automn leaves. Or it just happened to me.
Hi Ketz,
Those books are good to show that there are other ways, than the typical mainstream thought. The collective build by many, many 100 years of how people “have to live”
Human race is always involving, and those spiritual books are a part of our evolution to, it helped on the way to make the clicks in the mind, and to get to know your mind. At the end it are just perceptions, and we all got different perceptions. I think there is no one to judge to tell what perception is good our not. Writing is also a form of art. with words and expressing of moments, describing of feelings and create a story. You can see it the same like someone who play guitar, the extension of himself is an instrument, while a writer choose a pen, our type machine, laptop whatever as his extension. I don’t go accord that you say it for people between 16 and 20. cause everyone mb learns the same lessons, but in an other rhythm and other order. So why not someone of 40 could have something of this books. Conformation of abstract thinking. At the end there are so many possibilities and you can choose how you create you realty, by believing in it and with willpower.
Not obeying of how it’s told but make your own way, find the master in yourself and yep it’s true than you don’t need those books anymore but they are helpfully on the way. I learned that i know nothing, I’m just a fool but i believe in what i do, i stand behind it. i am responsible for my luck and the reality i live in. To know that is sometimes a bit heavy but in the end it’s a bliss…And all the great musicians all the great writers opened doors for us, were we could walk in to found out your own truth and stay open minded and open for others truth.flexible mind.
Mostly in my opinion there were you are against, you have to do to got a bigger wider seeing and don’t got stuck in stagnation of a truth you think is real. Cause everything is unreal, only the amount of attention make something real, if it’s now against our for…it’s the energy you give to it. And about this i doubt, are there things you can’t choose? are there things stronger than the mind…yes i think so.
Mb love is a good example for this. In the end we are still a piece of nature, how far we evolved we can’t denial that, and nature change all the time, seasons, from seed till flower, back to seeds back to flowers. From dark moon to full moon…We forget sometimes that we are small in comparing whit the gigantic planets circling above our heads. Don’t you think that they don’t got any influence on us? mystical is there for sure , it’s just not that far away as we think it is. It’s in the simple things in life showed. and Herman Hesse told that in his stories very beautiful, with those kind of books you have to read in-between the lines, the same with religious books, there is truth in there to. Only everything is exaggerated, and used to bring fear in people’s mind and control people by putting a black and white vision “this is good, this is bad”. while we all have to figure out for our self what is good our bad for us.And that’s for everyone personal. Yes i believe inside of me i “know” the answers but for sure it’s not my mind that know the answers. My mind got fooled by myself, i let it believe it discovered something, and waaw big inside. But in the end…..u full cup you can’t fill, it have to be empty.
So all wisdom and insights are temporally. Life is good when you trust in your own foolishness but than you have to be not afraid to leave the safe way. “conformations, convictions, patterns, how it have to be” and dare to be a fool who creates his/her realty whit respect for the other realities around.
And sins we are all unique, there are a bung of perceptions to got loosed in. Every leader need sheep’s “week minds”to project his reality and manifest his reality.
The same like Gandi and Hitler did. I choose my reality, like you choose yours. And people who have no opinion will support us, our people who feel this make sense.
so in the end of my writing i decide that every truth is untruth. We are ruff stones becoming diamonds every one in her/his way, every one in his/her rhyme. And no one can judge.. I believe in a higher force, a network of connections, a peaceful revolution in all art-forms tried to be expressed….all on the way, to who knows what 🙂
open , receiving, sharing growing…manifesting LOVE
and fuck hell ketz..lol
I’m for sure no hippy i found it just quiet logic and my words are follow by deeds. I follow the synchronicity, my “feeling” and it always bring me to the good place.
easing my mind, cause there is nothing to know. Only things to do and temporally insight to get to the point were you have to be…Yes i believe in Magic only it’s right behind my door and not in a fairytale creature landscape in a long lasting planet…
good night……………………………………………Sweet dreams