Higher Consciousness and Visionary Fiction

I’ve been blogging recently about higher states of consciousness. What’s that got to do with writing fiction? One of the accomplishments of Visionary Fiction as I see it is to subjectively explore what higher states of consciousness feel like. It’s all well and good to understand that these states exist and have some concept of them intellectually, but the real point is to achieve them ourselves. Lot of visionary fiction imagines what that’s like.

As Jodine Turner puts it, “In Visionary Fiction, esoteric wisdom is embedded in story so that the reader can actually experience it, instead of merely learning about it.” I asked some of my fellow Visionary Fiction Alliance writers to send me excerpts and here they are. Some of these books may appeal to you. I haven’t read them all myself yet.

From Michael Neer’s The Elixir of Freedom: “The trees bowed down till the golden amber stopped right in front of Ravi and Verda, like a giant pendant adorning the trees. This had to be it, Ravi thought. The Heart of the Sun!   The amber Heart hung like a jewel between them and the Sun. They looked through the Heart towards the sun. Waves of light stretched across land and space. They could see no end to the waves. They were infinite. Objects – trees, mountains, even the sun itself – were there – Ravi could make out their shapes—but it was like they were melted into one ocean of light. It was just one. Unified. Complete. Full. Immense.”

From Gerald R. Stanek’s Sonoran Ruminations:  “She said she told Peter what she told me; how she’d been staring at the circle, and pretty soon she could see the wall behind the circle, and then she could see outside the wall, and she could see the whole city, and the whole desert all around, and the whole big valley, and the whole continent, and the whole planet, but she could still see the desert and the city and the wall and the circle and she could hear every sound and it was like she was everything and everyone else just as much as she was herself, and I said ‘I know’, and I smiled and rocked the baby.”

From Stefan Emunds:  “Without warning, I enter into a lucid daydream. I find myself standing in front of a noisy river, but it’s no ordinary river – it’s the river of my thoughts and feelings, the stream of my internal dialogue. The river is deep with strong currents. I dip my foot into the cold water. Crossing the river seems like suicide, and I almost give up, but then the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt across the Jordan into the Promised Land comes to mind. Is there a deeper, psychological meaning to this story? Then it occurs to me that I have neither the Ark of the Covenant to herald me, nor the Living God by my side. How can I part these waters? “The original meaning of covenant is promise,” the voice whispers into my right ear. ‘I promise that you will find your true self on the other side. Go ahead and cross.’”

From Bob Fahey’s The Gardens of Ailana:  “As morning rose around her, Paulette carried no memories. This was joy without hope because the concept of hope held some belief that something was broken that needed fixing; something was ‘less’ that one wished could be ‘more’. There was no thought, no yearning for things to be different. Paulette had no concept of differences and moments. She had lost herself in the essence of sweetness.”