Limbo
Jedi Consular
- Joined
- Feb 29, 2008
- Messages
- 3,077
The sci-fi/comic book genre is to science as religion is to God.
There is a secret history to the sci-fi/comic book genre and it involves the paranormal, just so with religion too. Sci-fi/comic books inspire us, and sometimes that inspiration influences science. We write sci-fi, and sci-fi writes us. Just as we wrote religion, and religion wrote us. Sci-fi/comics are our modern secular mythology. Under the surface, all the elements of religion are there.
The difference is, we don't think of Clark Kent as a historical character. We think of Clark as a mere fiction. But what if Clark is more like a kind of trojan horse? Out of it jumps a mystical metaphor... an archetype of the collective unconscious.
"Absolutely. I mean, again the phrase, “the “human as two”” is meant as sort of the balancing point because of course the history of religion, the history of these experiences were usually understood to be some kind of God or deity or transcendent world intervening in the life of the person, wherewith these modern mystics, these authors and artists, they’re usually suspicious of those kinds of religious projections. They don’t see these experiences as proving the existence of God, per se, or some Heaven or some Hell.
They see these experiences establishing that the “human as two”, not that the human being is experiencing God but that the human experience of God is actually a human experience of some other aspect of the human being. God is, if you will, a name previous cultures and eras have given to this other part of who we actually are. So this ends up effectively divinizing human beings, but not the social self or the ego, not what I call the “Clark Kent” aspect of who we are but this sort of secret self, the other side of it that peeks through very rarely but fairly consistently throughout human history. So it’s really a way of trying to humanize and bring down the divinity into human experience." -Jeffrey Kripal
http://www.amazon.com/Mutants-Mystics-Science-Superhero-Paranormal/dp/0226453839
There is a secret history to the sci-fi/comic book genre and it involves the paranormal, just so with religion too. Sci-fi/comic books inspire us, and sometimes that inspiration influences science. We write sci-fi, and sci-fi writes us. Just as we wrote religion, and religion wrote us. Sci-fi/comics are our modern secular mythology. Under the surface, all the elements of religion are there.
The difference is, we don't think of Clark Kent as a historical character. We think of Clark as a mere fiction. But what if Clark is more like a kind of trojan horse? Out of it jumps a mystical metaphor... an archetype of the collective unconscious.
"Absolutely. I mean, again the phrase, “the “human as two”” is meant as sort of the balancing point because of course the history of religion, the history of these experiences were usually understood to be some kind of God or deity or transcendent world intervening in the life of the person, wherewith these modern mystics, these authors and artists, they’re usually suspicious of those kinds of religious projections. They don’t see these experiences as proving the existence of God, per se, or some Heaven or some Hell.
They see these experiences establishing that the “human as two”, not that the human being is experiencing God but that the human experience of God is actually a human experience of some other aspect of the human being. God is, if you will, a name previous cultures and eras have given to this other part of who we actually are. So this ends up effectively divinizing human beings, but not the social self or the ego, not what I call the “Clark Kent” aspect of who we are but this sort of secret self, the other side of it that peeks through very rarely but fairly consistently throughout human history. So it’s really a way of trying to humanize and bring down the divinity into human experience." -Jeffrey Kripal
http://www.amazon.com/Mutants-Mystics-Science-Superhero-Paranormal/dp/0226453839
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