Not too long ago I received an email
from an acquaintance who, knowing I'd written a novel, and perhaps as
an apology for being uninterested in reading it, said that he and his
wife didn't read novels anymore as such reading material was
incompatible with their spiritual journeys.
It may be that this man believed that
novels are just entertainment. He may have been one of the many
serious people I have met who believe that “truth” means facts
and therefore only comes in nonfiction form. But even though my own
definition of truth obviously differs from this, I myself have some
doubts about the novel as a means of delving into the deeper truths
of who or what we are.
Some define a spiritual novel as one
about spiritual topics. But maybe it's more a matter of what the
underlying assumptions are. In most novels, literary or not, we
follow one or more characters over a fictive period of time. Does
this not reinforce the idea that the stories we each tell ourselves
about our own lives are true? Do we not believe that, like the
characters of whose lives we read, we have a true history that
reveals what we essentially are?
Perhaps, then, a spiritual novel is not
so much about spiritual topics as about challenging this belief in a
fictive self as representing a fundamental truth about being human.
I've been reading Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch,
an unclassifiable book that is part criticism, part biography, and
part autobiography. Mead quotes George Eliot as saying, “Art is the
nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and
extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our
personal lot.” (p. 158, quoting from an essay by Eliot entitled,
“The Natural History of German Life”).
Mead
goes on to show how this attitude is exemplified in Middlemarch:
“This notion – that we each have our own center of gravity but
must come to discover that others weigh the world differently than we
do – is one that is constantly repeated in the book. The necessity
of growing out of such self-centeredness is the
theme of Middlemarch. In
one of the most memorable editorial asides in the novel, Eliot
elaborates upon this idea of how necessary it is to expand one's
sympathies: 'We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the
world as an udder to feed our supreme selves,' she writes.”
This sounds
suspiciously like a Buddhist teacher lecturing her students on the
inter-connectedness of all beings.
Those
who are really serious about spiritual awakening or enlightenment –
especially those who have had a glimpse or more of it – might say
that the self-centeredness into which we are all born only disappears
when we realize “no self,” and that it is not something that can
even be approximated by identifying sympathetically with others.
Nonetheless, surely it is worth something to be able to glimpse what
the world might look like if we all really knew
in our guts what we know in our minds: that our own perspective is
only one of a multitude of perspectives – that each and every being
on the planet comes from a center known as a “self” and that each
of these perspectives is equally, relatively speaking, valid.
