August 20, 2003
Fiction
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Apart from music, the one thing that remains popular over the ages is
story telling. It is an entertainment that educates.
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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.
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Fiction is a product of imagination.
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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.
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No actual event of history can possess human attention as fictional
literature can.
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In the field of management, it was discovered that graduates of
literature have a greater sense of judgement. Knowledge
of literature helps accomplish subconsciously.
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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.
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Thought expressed by language moves
away from literature and is born as philosophy.
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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.
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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.
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Negative accomplishment such as the atom bomb is of no value.
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War is a great event, but it is negative. The war leaders all over
Europe were defeated in the elections soon after the war. To win the war is
important, yet it does not make war or its leaders adorable in the eyes of the
population. Even the party of Churchill who saved the world was defeated.
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Accomplishment is acceptable only when it is positive, wholly positive.
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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, Krishna resorts to the ruses of adharma. Even The
Ramayana depicts the destruction of evil. Should literature express truths of
life in a positive atmosphere, life must become fully positive first.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As Mind is the next higher plane in the ascent, Matter is the next
higher plane in the descent.
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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.
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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.
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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 USSR that liberated the entire proletariat
all over the globe.
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Stalin was an evolutionary leader. Russia needed that tyranny at that
time. It does not make him a shining ideal now.
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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.
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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.