Some say we read fiction to escape but I always feel like I'm digging deeper into reality.
Robert McKee has a great take on it: ". . . fictional reality illuminates our daily reality. We do not wish to escape life but to find life, to use our minds in fresh, experimental ways, to flex our emotions, to enjoy, to learn, to add depth to our days. . . . Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence." -- from Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
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"We must assume our existence as broadly as we can. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in it. That is the only courage that is demanded of us -- to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter."
From - Rilke's Letters to A Young Poet The Hopi People would not think there was anything strange about the following, so called, coincidence.
A few years ago, I needed an atlas for my writing. I didn't plan to buy one right away because they were expensive. Even so, I wanted one and wished I had one. A day or so later, I was walking one block from my apartment when I passed my local mail box. Balanced on top of it was a large red book. Balanced so precariously it looked odd. Who would place a book on top of a mail box like that? It certainly looked like it had been abandoned. And because I can never pass up a book anywhere I stopped to see what it was. Have you guessed? It was an atlas. To the Hopi people, their word, Tunatya -- means: "it is hoped for." It also contains something of the notion in English of thought, desire, and cause. It refers to the unmanifest. Another word of theirs that looks similar, Tunatyava, means "comes true, being hoped for." The manifest. According to Webster, to manifest means - to reveal, to appear to the senses. Re Hopi philosophy: Teachings From The American Earth edited by Tedlock & Tedlock. A British military officer and his family watched as a horse-drawn carriage pulled upon their lawn and stopped. The officer's son walked up to it and saw what appeared to be a female figure inside. The image vanished before they could obtain a better look. The carriage left no horse tracks or wheel tracks.
"Life is more intricate than science will allow." 1902
Or did, back then, when he wrote that in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Some NDE'rs (people who have experienced being outside their body when they have been close to death) report having 360 degree vision during the experience:
"Robert Sullivan, an amateur NDE researcher from Pennsylvania who specializes in NDEs by soldiers during combat, interviewed a World War II veteran who temporarily retained this ability even after he returned to his physical body. 'He experienced three-hundred-sixty degree vision while running away from a German machine-gun nest,'says Sullivan. 'Not only could he see ahead as he ran but he could see the gunners trying to draw a bead on him from behind." From THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE by Michael Talbot. "All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world."
"The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, one realized how great a comfort it had been - how it had eased the burden of intolerable strangeness whicih this universe imposed on us." C.S. Lewis
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