Page 32 - NAMAH-Apr-2022

On Fantasy and Reality

Raag Yadava

Abstract
This piece is a short reflection on taking the mystic core of religion seriously. With rational
empiricism on one side and conventional modes of worship on the other, the claim of mysticism is
often reduced to imagination or fantasy, or dismissed as a biologically constructed experience. It is
rather a real and concrete, yet non-material, expression of our inmost being, in both its individual
and collective manifestations, and one that we must work to discover for the new creation to be
born tomorrow out of today’s tumult.

what the sage sees, not only thinks, prasyanti
s
buddhihh, once our permanent cataracts have
been surgically removed by a ray from the
Sun of Knowledge, tatsavitur.

There are worlds beyond, beings beyond,
states beyond our current reach, hidden deep
within our limited, moral frames — a world
quite unlike ours, fantastical only because we

Here’s a thought: perhaps the world we live have consented to this long imprisonment of
in is a fantasy. And what we call a fantasy is our material mind. But it’s not a creation of
truly real. Our disenchanted, buffered self, the imagination, an escape from reality into a
purely rational, proud of its empiricism, better world created out of our minds, a relief
unbelieving in anything other than what for the novelist, a weekend getaway from our
we perceive through the senses, or what work-a-day reality, a “revel of intellect and
our minds can process, is a fantasy — an fancy, imagination, a plaything and caterer for
incarceration of our limited imagination. our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-
What we call fantastical, out of our ordinary girl of the mind (1).” Quite the opposite — this,
reach, of another world, another dimension, all this around us, the real, after all, the great
is perhaps what is ultimately more real — traditions tell us, is not so — it is a cover, a

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