The Spiritual Words

So, hello hello.  If anyone reads the comments on here my mother (thanks mom) listed a pretty decent list of possible topic ideas.  While the fair majority of them are not-so-subtle ways to get to know her son better through his blog, one really stuck out.  So I thought I'd do a post on it.  Spirituality. Religion.  The big G.O.D (or whatever you wanna call it) that lives in the minds and hearts, or drags out the heart and mind, of every person on this planet.

What can be said about a topic so big?  Firstly, I did study this to some degree.  I have a bachelors in the subject, and so have approached it in a variety of ways over the years.  When I decided to major in this field in college I had to create an individual major (they did not offer it at UCSC, I guess religion just ain't that pertinent anymore, is it College 9??).  In doing so I had to write up a statement of purpose, a "why is this important to you, the college, and the world?"  I said big idealic things like religion is the fundamental element of life on this planet, the common denominator that has united man since they knew what they were, and that the study of it is there essential and relevant to all aspects of modern society.  I was an agent for change.  For understanding.  The bullshit slid and slipped a little on the slope of hope, but overall I still believe all that stuff.  The committee that approved me liked it, too.

But my real reason for studying religion, and this is a sentence I've said for the past four years, is that I love religious phenomena so much that I want to write about it. I love watching the history of mystical experience grow into a tangible human engine of world-wide change, and a novel or haiku or epic seven-book fantasy series that creates something similar, something parallel in scope and importance, is what really gets me going.  I want my fictional works to take their seeds from these seminal ideas of humankind, to reflect them.  I have always felt that these are the truest stories ever told, and the beautiful tales today are simply a re-telling.  So this is what I want, my aim my goal, and it is, as all things seem to be with me, wrapped up in religion.

Some examples?

Examples.  Hm.  How bout the guy born from the never-been-kissed and yet has a husband mother who defies and empire, gets strapped to a barbaric tortue device for three days, dies, returns from death in a flash of light, and levitates into the heavens, declaring a future age of weights and scales, thunder and lighting.  It gets more complicated and people do a lot with it, but that is arguably the story that our society is founded upon.  Themes?  A severed family, massing of a proletariat, the finger to the man, death, birth, salvation, betrayal, and above ALL, Harry Potter fans, love.  Love spilling from the fingers of a man through his invisible father, like a wand through his dead mother.

Examples, examples.  After ten horrendous plagues in the land of Sun Ra and The Mummy Returns a people, approximated at 40,000 inidivduals, fled together through a sea that parted into a desert. There they ate food that fell from the sky, prayed to a golden cow, watched a mountain thunder and lighting and then saw a voice, again from the heavens, saw it swing down through each of their souls and bind them together.  Their leader was an old stutterer and they were slaves.  Notice any similar themes?

How bout the prince who is exiled to the jungle.  His wife gets stolen by an evil demon who hordes a demon army, the prince tries to get her back and does so with a monkey king and his vast horde of monkey warriors.  Love war and a lot of drugs, I am guessing.  Or maybe the prince who renounces his throne, gets sick by a river and then finds the truth under a tree.  He spreads his message and inspires a modern rock band.  Or the prophet who saw an angel, wrote a book, and now holds the hearts and clocks billions.

I could go on, but I don't want to bore you. My point in all of this is that these stories, real or not, are fascinating.  This is what I want to create.  They touch on all the points of our selves our books today strive to.  And if you look hard and long enough you can see that the whole thing is like Regeanomics, it trickled down through the ages.  I want to be a part of the society that creates our society, I hope that doesn't seem odd.  A professor of mine once told that up until the Enlightenment in Europe, almost all great minds were religious scholars.  Religious issues were the greatly debated, they were political and powerful and about the masses, they affected all parts and life and to be on the stage of the world was to be a person of spiritual importance.  Maybe I'm just into old things.  I do love antique shops and yard sales.

The last (I think as I write) part of this that I want to discuss is the form of the stories.  Today we like our narrative, our I, you, he/she, our individual authors and publish dates and spell-checks. One of the coolest (I'm not a nerd I swear) aspects of all this religious crap is the way in which they wrote it. Parables in the New Testament, take what you will from this please.  Jesus taught and taught and here are some veiled versions of what that was so that you, the reader, can find peace in your own life.  They were less wordy than today's literature, but they certainly were creative.  And the repetition, you can see them sitting around fires putting everyone into a hypnotic trance as the wars of Troy trickles from the lips of some bard.  The need to get the story across, to plant it in your mind so that your soul can recognize it when life happens to you, these are seriously didactic stories that are told with power.  I love them for that.

So this is some of my spiel on religion and spirituality.  It is my passion you see, and so I can write forevs on this stuff.  I appreciate those of you who read.  I really do.  Also, I am currently reading James Joyce and he is really amazing, spews the spiritual catholic irish mentality out like nobody's business.  I love it, love it all.

p.s. god=dog?  think about it.