Page 33 - NAMAH-Apr-2022

Namah On Fantasy and Reality

a
dream, a maya from which we wake up into waiting for the adventurer soul — which is
a world of the real, the wonderful, where the fantasy, which is real? So asked King Janaka,
laws of physics dance with the greater laws of caught between two worlds, unsure if he was
beauty and harmony, of wonder and delight. asleep or awake.

Visions from elsewhere come, in those Our world is an illusion, a tragic dream
gleaming moments of silence, when we forget and something in us looks to break free.
ourselves and see beyond. Yet, long habit, and There is no reason, no why, only a wonder,
a scientism that has cancelled the capacity to a longing, a seeking that is beyond words.
feel our depths without a calculator in hand, And nothing can convince us otherwise, no
insists that it is only a quirk of momentary grim earthliness can deny us our unearthly
biochemical imbalance, an oddity of the neural longings, for a greater reality: for that
network, to be explained away into some rare magic gleam seems more real than a
mathematical inconsequence. Our intellect, lifetime of earthly labour. A vision, a light, a
towering in its victory over the world, master momentary glimpse of another world — the
of industry and science, has left the poet, the supreme dissent of our soul, trapped in this
seer in us dry — an objectivism that denies the little bodily frame:
soul, and insists on its deadening, universal
law. As the great poet said: “The mystic tract beyond our waking thoughts,
A door parted, built in by Matter’s force,
“Imposed its rigid artifice on the soul; Releasing things unseized by earthly sense:
An aide of the inventor intellect, A world unseen, unknown by outward mind
It cut Truth into manageable bits Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul.
That each might have his ration of thought-food, He sat in secret chambers looking out
Then new-built Truth’s slain body by its art: Into the luminous countries of the unborn
A robot exact and serviceable and false Where all things dreamed by the mind are seen
Displaced the spirit’s finer view of thing (2).” and true
And all that the life longs for is drawn close (6).”
But another view is possible, a magical
realism that carries our buried hopes for Yet proud are we, “unbelieving sons and
a greater world, a reality, what seems to us daughters of modernity (7)”, of our enlightened
fantasy, that is lurking behind, looking to material incarceration. The living fire within,
invade us if we permit ourselves to travel to the Fire that upholds the worlds, the immaterial
other worlds. The inert body of God, plumbed cause of our material existence, made
by our science, waiting for a “glow of the immaterial — “inflicting on the heights the
Unmanifest (3)”, an experience of something abysm’s law, it sullies with its mire heaven’s
unearthly, yet so real that a single glance messengers (8).” Matter explored, the atom blasted
can change our lives forever. “A glory and a open, the last of the virgin lands mapped and
rapture and a charm (4)” in a world of matter a developmentalism that has conquered the
— where the only eternal law is not of gravity, Earth. A statistical environmentalism and an
nor of Darwin, but of pain, suffering and economy that has consumed our souls, along
decay — sits “unknown within the heart (5)”, with our forests. A world without magic.

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