Where does fiction find its importance...

... as in our case Star Wars? Is there any real importance in these films or novels? Or is this solely reserved for RPG`s, Sci- Fi fans, Geeks etc?

What about real life? Do we not have enough serious problems to deal with? So why fiction?

Is it just a form of escapism, a way of numbing pain, shirking responsability?

Are we not just postponing real issues?

How can fiction defend itself as a valuable asset to culture if the above is true?

How does it contribute to our development culturaly, spiritualy, mentaly, physicaly?

Haven`t we loved such stories since the beginning of time? No matter how busy or stressed we are, many of us like to hear the simple “Let me tell you a story.” Even the market seems to have caught onto this idea by using advertisement. Rehabilitation uses stories as channel to healing. Even my daughter repeatedly begs “Read me a story!” at bedtime? Is that what Thomas Aquinas was getting at when he refered to us as being more than rational animals. Does strory sharing make us human.

So what role does story sharing, Science Fiction, Star Wars play in your life?

Like on free days I...
...refresh mind, body, spirit
...regain new enthusiasm for reality
...develop new perspectives

Does story sharing also provide you with an opportunity to change much of what is within your power to change about your current situation, namely, yourself and your behavior. Does it help to take a break, break with your old ways and patterns which began to stand in your way?

For me Fiction is like a free day providing a safe place where I can experiment at my leisure with new ideas and different approaches. In some ways it promotes a flexibility of mind I need to solve the problems of reality. Is Fiction a skill?.

Are the values of stories not to be judged on how well they provide meaning to or for our lives no matter how small? Even when if it is just the feeling we are not alone in this world, knowing Luke Skywalker, Yoda etc journey with us? To know this feeds our inner selves in a way that can empower us to go on in spite of the restrictions of our reality environment. Ideally, we are energized to keep on going, imagining new and improved solutions to our all-too-real problems.

How does Fiction do this? How does it inspire us to go on? What in us does Fiction speak to or speak about that fuels persistence?

The Australian author David Malouf believes that what we experience through our imagination is every bit as real was what we experience directly in the every day. He believes that “the whole point of storytelling or drama may be just this: that by experiencing things in imagination, in apprehending and exploring them that way, we can save ourselves from having to live them out as fact.”

Here are some reflections of fiction on death:

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, \"The Body\"
Arguably the greatest television episode about death ever, the episode where Buffy's mom dies is stark and uncompromising in forcing us to face the loss Buffy is going through. There are people who have watched this episode to cope with the real-life deaths of their mothers or other loved ones. With no music playing in the episode, there's nothing to take you away from the reality of what's happened, and peripheral characters like Tara (who talks about the death of her own mother) and Anya (who doesn't know how to behave, or what it all means) help to illuminate the huge gaping hole in Buffy's life. And then Anya says:

\"I don't understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she's- There's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead anymore. It's stupid. It's mortal and stupid. And-and Xander's crying and not talking, and-and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch ever, and she'll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why.\"

Cards of Grief by Jane Yolen
This novel, which was also a short story, takes place on an alien world where grieving is much, much more important than it is among humans. Grieving for dead relatives is a major undertaking, and people trace their lines of ancestors and grieve for them. We follow a particular poet and famous griever known as the Gray Wanderer — and in the short story version, we see the Gray Wanderer through the eyes of her young apprentice, who then has the task of grieving for the Gray Wanderer after she dies, by creating Tarot-like Cards of Grief. Leading to this beautiful passage:

\"I was silent while I worked, and it may be that it was my silence that first called the mourners in, for if I had any reputation at all as a young griever, it was not for silence. But if it was the silence that called them in, it was the cards of grief that brought them back.

It took a week of days and sleepless nights before I was done with the painting of them. And then I slept for another week, hardly knowing who I was or what I was or where I was sleeping. My hands were so stained with paint that it was months before they were clean again. The clothes I had worn for that week I burned. I do not think I ever truly recovered my health. But I brought her a line of grievers as had never been seen before, long solemn rows of mourners; young and old, men as well as women. Even the starfarers came, borne in by curiosity I am sure, but started to weep with the rest. And each time the cards are seen, another griever is added to her line. Oh, the Gray Wanderer is an immortal for sure.\"

The Earthsea books by Ursula K. Le Guin
Death is the greatest mystery to be unraveled in Le Guin's amazing Earthsea books. As Elizabeth Cummins points out in her book Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin, the first book begins with this poem:

\"Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.\"

In his youth, the arrogant young wizard Ged tries to contact a dead spirit, and unleashes a nameless, fearsome creature on the world. And when Ged has finally reached maturity, he must sacrifice all of his magic in order to stop another wizard, Cob, who has opened a breach between the land of the living and the land of the dead so he can live forever. But it's really in the final Earthsea book, The Other Wind, that we really confront the necessity and meaning of death. It turns out that the afterlife that Ged saw in a previous book was created artificially by wizards, and it's keeping souls from the cycle of death and rebirth — and the dead aren't happy about this idea. Nor are the dragons, whose land was taken to create the land of the dead. Setting the dead free, sending them away forever, turns out to be the hardest quest of them all — but it's totally necessary.

Shamanic tradition (as well as many other practices) holds that what we do in altered states of reality (dreams, trance-states, etc) affects what we perceive of as physical reality. In this way, our dreams shape the word around us in the same way that our intentions manifest themselves, given sufficient focus and belief. To quote \"Monkey\", the TV series based on the Buddhist stories usually entitles \"Monkey's Journey to the West\": Tathagata Buddha, the Father Buddha, said, 'With our thoughts we make the world.'

Myths, fictions and historical archetypes are a part of this too. Neil Gaiman wrote a great fictional novel called \"American Gods\" - in it, he describes how deities are formed from belief and poses the question of what happens to them when that belief wanes. It's a great read!

Often in healing sessions, clients experience such information but dismiss it with the line \"but it's only my imagination\". My response is usually: but where does that imagination come from? And what makes you so sure that it's not real just because it cannot be measured according to physical principles?

MTFBWY

Terence McKenna, visionary and shamanic experiential explorer, had the follwing to say (taken from an article entitled \"New Maps of Hyperspace\"):

\"In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus tells us, \"History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken\". I would turn this around and say that history is what we are trying to escape from into dream. The dream is eschatological. The dream is zero time and outside of history. We wish to escape into the dream. Escape is a key thing charged against those who would experiment with plant hallucinogens. The people who make this charge hardly dare face the degree to which hallucinogens are escapist. Escape. Escape from the planet, from death, from habit, and from the problem, if possible, of the Unspeakable.

If one leaves aside the last three hundred years of historical experience as it unfolded in Europe and America, and examines the phenomenon of death and the doctrine of the soul in all its ramifications - Neoplatonic, Christian, dynastic-Egyptian, and so on, one finds repeatedly the idea that there is a light body, an entelechy that is somehow mixed up with the body during life and at death is involved in a crisis in which these two portions separate. One part loses its raison d'être and falls into dissolution; metabolism stops. The other part goes we know not where. Perhaps nowhere if one believes it does not exist; but then one has the problem of trying to explain life. And, though science makes great claims and has done well at explaining simple atomic systems, the idea that science can make any statement about what life is or where it comes from is currently preposterous.

Science has nothing to say about how one can decide to close one's hand into a fist, and yet it happens. This is utterly outside the realm of scientific explanation because what we see in that phenomenon is mind as a first cause. It is a example of telekinesis: matter is caused by mind to move. So we need not fear the sneers of science in the matter of the fate or origin of the soul. My probe into this area has always been the psychedelic experience, but recently I have been investigating dreams, because dreams are a much more generalized form of experience of the hyperdimension in which life and mind seem to be embedded.

Looking at what people with shamanic traditions say about dreams, one comes to the realization that for these people dream reality is experientially a parallel continuum. The shaman accesses this continuum with hallucinogens as well as with other techniques, but most effectively with hallucinogens. Everyone else accesses it through dreams. Freud's idea about dreams was that they were what he called \"day-residues\", and that one could trace the content of a dream down to a distortion of something that happened during waking time.

I suggest that it is much more useful to try to make a geometric model of consciousness, to take seriously the idea of a parallel continuum, and to say that the mind and the body are embedded in the dream and the dream is a higher-order spatial dimension. In sleep, one is released into the real world, of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometric sense. There is a plenum - recent experiments in quantum physics tend to back this up - a holographic plenum of information. All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. Information stands outside of time in a kind of eternity - an eternity that does not have a temporal existence about which one may say, \"It always existed.\" It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity. We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.

One way of thinking of this is to suppose that the waking world and the world of the dream have begun to merge so that in a certain sense the school of UFO criticism that has said flying sources are hallucinations was correct in that the laws that operate in the dream, the laws that operate in hyperspace, can at times operate in three-dimensional space when the barrier between the two modes becomes weak. Then one gets these curious experiences, sometimes called psychotic breaks, that always have a tremendous impact on the experient because there seems to be an exterior component that could not possibly be subjective. At such times coincidences begin to build and build until one must finally admit that one does not know what is going on. Nevertheless, it is preposterous to claim that this is a psychological phenomenon, because there are accompanying changes in the external world. Jung called this \"synchronicity\" and made a psychological model of it, but it is really an alternative physics beginning to impinge on local reality.\"

MTFBWY

I don't know much about those you have posted....

Seriously, the \"Choose Your Own Adventures\"'unread as a kid, showed me, that there is only one path... There is no going back.. I would mark pages, trying to be able to return to the path I was on,'only to lose my place several pages in....

Not to mention the many writers, Stephen King, Isaac Asminov, Douglas Adams, newer to me, Dan Millman.... I am a reader... I love the imaginary world....

Men in Black, HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, Kalifornia, man... Movies too...

Reality is a trip, man...

Aesopes Fables, Campfire stories, Tall Tales of Paul Bunion and Pecos Bill, scary stories to keep us from going out at night.....

Jon wrote:
The Australian author David Malouf believes that what we experience through our imagination is every bit as real was what we experience directly in the every day. He believes that “the whole point of storytelling or drama may be just this: that by experiencing things in imagination, in apprehending and exploring them that way, we can save ourselves from having to live them out as fact.”

So true....

I think sci fi is important in someways - it keeps the brain exercised in terms of creativity.

Also, folks may snipe etc at Jediism and Starwars - but didnt the writers of all the holy books and in history in general (greek epics etc) use 'stories' to portray an idea and give out messages to those who couldnt read ?

Why cant film/scifi not be seen in the same way?

No one barks at environmentalists screaming 'thats all so Avatar' (even if most the plot and idea are starwars )

just my brief pennies worth but Lord Of The Flies teaches a lot to those who are willing to read it and take in the messages.

MTFBWY - A

Kana Seiko Haruki wrote:

just my brief pennies worth but Lord Of The Flies teaches a lot to those who are willing to read it and take in the messages.

Never read this one either, but wanted to, much like The Art Of War (now read/listened to).... I didn't do the college thing and I barely made it through high school english... Love to read (now listen to) books, might bump this one up in my list, as soon as my Nietzsche lesson is done....

And let's not forget the fiction of song....

The what-if's....
The why didn't I's....
The Howcome's...
The Poor me's, Take on the World's, Can't we all get along's....

Music runs the gamut of emotions and thoughts, as well.....