Mystical realism: Motivations, inspirations, and opportunities
In previous posts, I explained both why I chose the name Deus in Fabula and then both what I plan to do and how you fit in as a subscriber.
To complete the introduction for this newsletter, then, this post explains where I’m coming from:
Why am I interested in this matter of spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism in the first place?
What’s motivating the quest for it?
Why specifically in fiction?
And why am I taking a rather long view of the matter—and wanting to involve other authors as well—rather than simply trying to generate fictional works of my own?
A karmic debt
In August 1990 I graduated from the University of Washington and started full-time work at Microsoft as a developer support engineer. Though the role wasn’t as glamorous as the coveted software development positions (in which I’d worked as an intern), it did have one notable benefit: regular hours. Consequently, I discovered, for the first time as an adult, leisure time. So, what did I do? As I wrote in Chapter 5 of my memoir, Mystic Microsoft: A Journey of Transformation in the Halls of High Technology (written under my given name, Kraig Brockschmidt):
I essentially spent much of that time—oddly enough—preparing myself to one day leave Microsoft. … I [knew] deep within myself that I wouldn’t be there my whole life. I had entered the computer field [only] because it offered the best opportunities—not because it was my true passion. What really interested me were things like astronomy, history, cosmology, music, psychology, photography, and even certain elements of spirituality. To these interests I someday hoped to devote more, indeed, all, of my energy.
To that end, I started to read—a lot—especially enjoying the fact that I could finally choose my own reading material rather than textbooks or something a professor had assigned. And it became quite an adventure! As Mystic Microsoft relates, this reading became the basis for my spiritual search, a search for Truth. Five years and two hundred and sixteen distinct books later, along with many pages filled with excerpts from those books plus copious notes and commentary, I found what I was looking for and committed the rest of my life to the path of growing into that Truth.
Now, early on in my search I read quite a lot of fiction: 43 of the first 88 titles, to be precise. After that, however, there were only nine in the next 128. Why the shift? As I wrote in Chapter 14 of Mystic Microsoft:
I got very serious about reading only those books that I thought to have a high “truth density” [such as philosophy, religion, science, psychology, sociology, and history]—I purged my library of extraneous “junk” books, especially cheap fiction and the like that were dense on entertainment but sparse on ideas.
That is, although most novels that I read had one or two valuable insights, such material constituted only a page or two out of 300 or more. So, I stopped reading fiction for the most part. But, as my unflattering epithet indicates, my emotionally immature and opinionated self at the time wasn’t satisfied with assessing the value of fiction where my personal search for Truth was concerned. Nor did I understand the fallacy of one-to-many inferences or inferences based on a small sample size. Thus, I extended my critical assessment of such gripping volumes like Thongor and the City of Magicians to fiction as a whole, deeming it more or less spiritually worthless.
Well, hah! One of those Truths that I had yet to learn is that whatever we criticize in others will have to be experienced ourselves so that we learn, grow, and understand. Criticism, in short, incurs a karmic debt that must eventually be repaid in kind.
It’s no surprise, then, that I’ve been led by the inexorability of karmic law to explore the spiritual potential of fiction.
The persistent notion
The first inkling of that karmic debt came in 1995, when a scenario for a novel occurred to me while reading a book about cosmology (one of those “high truth density” subjects). This was about the same time that I was starting to entertain ideas about what a post-Microsoft life might look like. Because I’d done a lot of technical writing in my career, creative writing seemed a natural next step. Toward that end I even bought a little volume called The Fiction Writer’s Help Book.
But, as told again in Mystic Microsoft, many things happened later that year and into 1996 that completely (and this is not hyperbole) up-ended my life. By the end of 1996 I’d resigned from Microsoft, my wife and I sold our house and moved into a spiritual community, and I began to shift my focus away from ego-aggrandizement toward ego-transcendence through prayer, meditation, devotion to God, and serviceful activity.
Amidst all that, fiction writing was relegated to the “eventually” category: when writing energies did appear, they took expression in non-fiction, namely the aforementioned Mystic Microsoft along with The Harmonium Handbook, Solving Stress, and Finding Focus. Then my wife and I welcomed our son onto the stage in 2006, and to support them both I returned to Microsoft in 2008 in program management and content development roles that involved great deal of technical writing (such as blogs, whitepapers, extensive documentation, and 2400 pages of Windows programming books).
There wasn’t much left for writing fiction.
Still, the notion never left me. Other story ideas kept popping up, which, because I knew it wasn’t yet time to do any serious work on them, I duly recorded in paper notebooks, OneNote pages, and Word docs. Occasionally I’d draft a scene or dabble in a little never-will-see-the-light-of-day fan fiction, but nothing more than that.
In 2018 I felt that my second tenure at Microsoft was starting to wane. For one thing, my wife and I were nearing financial goals for early retirement. Second, we decided to homeschool our son in middle school and high school starting in 2019 and knew that high school, specifically, would preclude a full-time career. That said, my portion of that homeschooling would be only a half-time role, which would leave me with space for other ventures.
Thus did that old idea of writing fiction began to reemerge.
A question posed by a trusted friend
But what did I want to write, really? I already knew I wasn’t interested in producing the usual sorts of genre fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, romance, etc.). No, writing must for me always be a vehicle for spiritual growth, that is, a means to attune myself to God and the flow of divine consciousness within and through me. (Something I’d already experienced years earlier as told in Mystic Microsoft.)
About this same time I read a novel called Love Perfected, Life Divine by my spiritual brother Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters). The book is a (shortened) revision of a 1911 novel called The Life Everlasting by Marie Corelli and one of Kriyananda’s last literary works: he completed the edit in about two weeks just three months before he left his body in 2013, just shy of his 87th birthday.
What struck me most in Love Perfected, Life Divine was not the story but rather a question that Kriyananda posed in his introduction:
One reason I have read her books is that Marie Corelli is the only novelist I know who wrote outright spiritual novels. I refer to novels that are not afraid to express openly the author’s devotion to God, without enclosing the reader in a narrow box of sectarianism. I have often asked myself: Why have there been no others? We can go to stories that are almost, or entirely, scriptural: Pilgrim’s Progress in the West; the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in India. But stories attuned to modern times that yet contain a simple, devotional story, inspiring people to seek God—well, if you know of any such, please tell me about them. What Marie Corelli succeeded in doing was uplift the heart. At the time when she wrote, there was a public for this sort of thing. Is there none now? [bold added]
I had to agree: of the 70+ fictional works I’d added to my reading history since 1996 (which, I might add, were exclusively written in English), the few that even approach this kind of upliftment were written in the 1940s or earlier and, furthermore, were often biographical or historical in nature, rather than being contemporary. (Corelli’s novels were contemporary in her own time but are now rather anachronistic.)
Are there any such stories by modern authors?
This is the question that launched my quest. Finding various lists of “spiritual fiction” on Goodreads, Amazon, and other sources, I was initially hopeful. But I have to say that although there is ample spiritual literature, including memoirs like Letters by a Modern Mystic and Autobiography of a Yogi, which (along with various fictional memoirs) are great examples of mystical realism, there is precious little in terms of contemporary novels or even short stories. And within what does exist, the “spirituality” is often vague, sectarian, or curiously materialistic. Other stories are centered on extraordinary beings or situations rather than ordinary people, like the rest of us, going about our business in everyday life (which is what I mean by “realism”). And although such tales might entertain us mortals, they don’t leave us feeling inspired to seek our own immortality in God.
If you know of any such works, including any by non-English authors, leave a note in the comments. And I’ll be writing about what bits I’ve found in future posts.
Which means…
There’s an opportunity here. Indeed, the natural conclusion of all this, which aligns with my goals for writing in the first place, is the thought, “Well, why don’t you try writing some stuff like this yourself?”
OK, but that demands greater clarity around what those “spiritual novels” and “simple, devotional stories, inspiring people to seek God" actually look like in practice. Hence my tagline for Deus in Fabula, “A quest for spiritual, devotional, and mystical realism.”
It also demands finding the “public” (that is, the audience) for such works. I’m convinced there is an audience, but, given that this “mystical realism” isn’t already a defined genre, it’s going to take some work to find it, or, shall I say, generate enough magnetism around the concept to attract the appropriate audience.
And like I said in my previous post, there’s only so much I can do as one author. My experience and sensibilities are necessarily limited, as is my capacity to produce. Thus, to fully service that audience, it’s necessary to inspire other authors—hopefully many others—in this direction.
Clarity, magnetism, and inspiration. That’s what Deus in Fabula is about.
What do you think?