Peridyd's Progress

The most powerful myths are about extremity; they force us to go beyond our experience. There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before. Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence.... [M]yth is not a story told for its own sake. It shows us how we should behave.
--A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong

For the past few months, I've been reading Robert Jordan's fantasy series, The Wheel of Time. I began reading book one, Eye of the World in April. I finished book seven, A Crown of Swords, just the other evening. That's several thousand pages in a few months. I've read other, more serious and traditionally academic texts interspersed with the Jordan, but Jordan's constituted the bulk of my reading during this time.

For those of us who are academics—I run the Writing Center at Oregon State University and have a Masters Degree in English Literature—being seen with a fantasy novel, especially more than once, will sometimes engender “the look,” wherein a student or a colleague calls you to task for reading something lighter than, say, Andrew Delbanco's new Melville bio (which by the way, is on my shelf of books to read, and I will read it, but only after I finish book eleven of The Wheel of Time).

Although I usually respond to these well-intentioned quasi indictments about how far my reading has fallen with a semi-pat answer about needing to read for enjoyment (and although it's true that I do enjoy reading the Jordan series), there's another reason that I relish the Jordan series (but which I'm less sanguine sharing with my colleagues and associates at the university): reading the Rand books will occasionally induce a very powerful spiritual experience, often accompanied by important spiritual insight(s). Experiences and insights that rival some of my deeper meditations.

How is such a thing possible? In addition to being great stories, the Wheel of Time series borrows heavily from the mythic. In my experience, there are times when mythic tales resonate with a spiritual issue that I'm attending to in my practice, and when that happens, dislodging me from the mundane and entering a place where insight can occur is a natural by-product of reading.

I don't mean to suggest that everyone who reads fantasy will experience spiritual states or achieve spiritual insight. However, for those of us for whom spiritual states are a reality, the mythic elements in fantasy, their ability to defamiliarize commonplace experience can trigger states which then, in turn, trigger insight.

I bring this up as a way of beginning a conversation (hopefully not just a monologue) on the possibilities of reading beyond logos, logic, and reason, each of which can give us the how of our daily lives, but which will not provide much depth or discovery into who we are. In my experience, it's the mythic, the contemplative, and the meditative that provide the latter. Though it might be controversial for some, I want to suggest that reading can be a vehicle for the latter as well as for the former.