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The Discontents of Literalism
It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.
~ Stephen King
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The prison of the modern mind is partly created by the common belief that “reality” can be limited to logic, statistics, and provable facts. Not that the literal world is “unreal,” rather that it is the first level of reality and can never depict all that is truly Real.
Restricting all modes of presence to a single plane of being leads to being trapped in a narrow view of life and imprisoned in the linear trap of time.
Too much “hard reality” and the world becomes as if flat again; we lose touch with all that makes this earth a place of wonder and beauty and hidden possibilities.
Our world is a reflection of our own soul. Because we have learned to deny the world its soul and therefore its connection to the divine, it, too, can seem to be dying. Under the spell of literalism and the tyranny of facts and statistics, the modern legacy becomes an increasingly diminished world that has been overly quantified as well as thoroughly exploited.
The rise of literalism signals the loss of imagination underlying both the fixation with measurable facts and the fundamentalism of fanatic beliefs.
