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#2800 - Friday, April 27, 2007 - Editor: Jerry Katz
One: Essential Writings on Nonduality http://nonduality.com/one.htm.
The Nondual Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
I think we may be seeing the emergence of the first literary nonduality novel. Not of all times, but the first one fed by the teaching of nonduality as set forth in the last ten years. That kind of fiction is going to be different from any other kind of nonduality fiction. Here are a couple of tastes.
Excerpt from a nonduality novel: The Board of Directors of Wars, by Floyd Henderson
http://advaitavedantameditations.blogspot.com/
And a slice from Pete's pie.
I myself have never written a novel, but if I ever do it'll probably begin, "It was a dark and stormy email."
“You seem at peace in the middle of
this chaos. I want that peace,” Brett almost demanded.
“Brett, you’ve been shown the answer all your life. It
was there for you to see in every play, in every movie, in every
mystery you’ve ever read. Shakespeare borrowed the dramatic
technique from the Greeks,” Kirk began. “Today, it’s
the basis of all mystery and suspense stories, and it’s also
the basis of realization.”
“I’m lost,” Brett confessed.
“Well look at every drama you’ve ever seen. The main
character, who represents you and me and everyone, runs around
like a chicken with its head cut off. He is confused and in the
dark. Those who are in a position to sit back and witness the
drama objectively can see that he’s just an actor on the
stage and that none of the drama is real. But for entertainment’s
sake, he and the witnesses can pretend it’s real. Both, in
fact, can get so absorbed in the role that they take it to be the
real for a time.
“But even amidst all of the drama, a time comes, that moment
in the play when even the actor finds out the truth. It is called
the peripetia in drama—that moment in the play or
the movie when the lead actor finds out that everything he
thought to be true is really false; when he sees that he was
being misled at every turn; when those he thought he could trust
the most, and who thought they were telling him the truth, were
also wrong.
“It’s the moment of freedom that comes when one finds
out that everything he ever thought or believed or held sacred
(or thought worth fighting for) was a lie. The freedom comes when
he gives up all of the concepts he bought into, drops his head in
relief and amazement, shakes his head back and forth, wonders for
a moment at how he had bought into all their crap, smiles at how
easily he was duped, watches how all of the rest of the play
unfolds automatically until its end, and leaves the stage after
saying to himself, ‘Well, sonofabitch. I’ll be
damned.’ And then he laughs. He laughs at it all. And
then he’s done with it, once and for all.”
~ ~ ~
Read more about this book here: http://www.floydhenderson.com/boardofdirectors.htm
Pete writes:
I have started a new group named
Enlightened Fiction.
This is a group that features my fictional short stories
about spirituality and life in general. Enlightened, here
is taken in the European philosophical sense of the
word- as thinking in a free, new, iconoclastic way, in
which
thought begets more thoughts without paying homage to
tradition.
It's a public site, you don't have to join to read on site, but
if you care to post your own stories whether fictional, or true,
or if you want to make a comment, or receive new postings
via email, then you'll have to join the list.
To give an example of what kind of fare you'll find there,
below is the latest story I posted. It's a satire about memoir
writing, which got hughes laughs when I read it at a gathering
of local writers.
Enightenedfiction@yahoogroups.com
The Never Ending Memoirs.
By Pete
Old people as they get close to that opaque disquieting wall we
call
death, begin to look back to what they fancy were their lives.
But I
found little comfort in those jumbled, imprecise memories.They
seemed to drift, and change like clouds, avoiding my grasp.
So I decided to write my memoirs.
My children wish I never did. I was hoping to bring order and
substance to my past. What could be more solid than a book that
you can take in your hands, and lay on your lap, and say: There--
that's my life?
It was a fool's errand, I begin to realize. Nothing, a stranger
would
find worth reading happened to me, and my writing style was sure
to make my lackluster subsisting seem more dull. I was too fond
of passive sentences, gerunds, dangling adverbial phrases, and
the like. If something could be said with one word, I needed
five.
The odds were stacked against my memoir. The planets were in
all the wrong houses from the start. But then, something
miraculous happened. My book took over, and wrote itself.
I was unable to write my life as I remembered it. Another life--
one more fanciful, more poetic began to emerge from my pen,
and superimpose itself on my prosaic existence.
I found with dismay, I had no control over what I wrote.
Someone else was writing my memoir. Words poured into my
head, flowed from my hand, and I had no say on what was
what. It didn't matter that my wife, as far as I know, had been
faithful to the end.The story required a lover, and that was
that. And the story, also, demanded a movie star to play that
role. And to my most fervent protest, it also demanded a
manage a troi.
Needless to say, my children on reading what I wrote were
aghast.
"Dad, Mother was never unfaithful, and she wasn't the most
beautiful woman in the world, and she didn't have green eyes.
Have you gone mad?"
I didn't know what to say, except it was my life, and I could
remember it in any way I wanted. I couldn't blame them
from
resenting the memoir. In my book, I have endowed them with
new lives they never knew they had. My youngest, I wrote,
fought in the Iraq war and had been killed while capturing
Sadam. Although he was much alive, and a hairdresser in
San Francisco living with a roommate named Carl.
Had I been satisfied with one memoir, it'd have been all
right. But I was infested with the memoir bug. I wrote
memoir, after memoir, each one more bizarre than the
previous one. And to my children's dismay, they all were
best sellers. And now, their friends stared at them with
knowing smiles.
So, I can't really blame them for doing what they did.
They found a judge to declare me mad. Now, in my cell,
I'm deprived of paper, or laptop. But the memoir bug
has not died. I'm thinking about writing a new memoir
on these bare walls. One in which neither I, nor they
were ever born.
But I'm having a little trouble finding anything to write
regarding such life.