The attraction of Harry Potter

Fairy tales are full of magic from Snow White to Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty. Even the granddaddy legend of them all, King Arthur, has the wizard Merlin. Walt Disney himself used the pixie Tinkerbell to announce the Sunday evening Disney movie, such as, Mary Poppins.

As a kid I watched the 60s TV show Bewitched. And we've all seen the image of the magician with the hat, the cape, and the wand uttering the words "abra cadabra" and then pulling a rabbit out of the hat. Though it could never actually happen there was always the secret wish to be able to do magic. To wiggle one's nose or use a wand or cast a spell to make something happen. The popularity of Harry Potter indicates that a great many people have this same wish.

It isn't just about doing magic that draws people into the story though, it is also about the parallel world it represents. The works of fantasy I've read or watched often leaves the ordinary world behind by means of a portal, Alice in Wonderland being a prime example. In Harry Potter the magical world co-exists with our own. In fact, it is the same world. The only difference is that the magical world has been deliberately hidden from the ordinary viewer. In Betelgeuse, the goings-on of the after-world are deliberately hidden until during the wedding the parents are finally able to see the ghost-world. It is a theme played out in many stories and movies including the science fiction film The Matrix.

This is a common theme not only in fairy tales and other works of fiction but in the realm of spiritual teachings where the deeper dimensions of life are revealed to the earnest seeker of spiritual truth. We call these folks mystics. Unfortunately, in the words of Petunia Dursley, they are often called "freaks."

Just as Charles Dickens took great pains to establish that Jacob Marley was dead, dead as a door nail in fact though what was particularly dead about a door nail escaped Dickens, J. K. Rowling made sure we understood from the very beginning what it means to be "normal." This reminds me of the muggle story Peyton Place and the kind of conformity it imposed upon its residents despite the actual reality of their lives.

We all know about the difference between how things appear and how they really are but we often go along with the charade of keeping up appearances even when it is a lie. Of course the Durselys are a caricature, an exaggerated version of people we've all met and known. This is after all a children's story. The muggle drama of Peyton Place leaves little room for imaging a different world or a different way of living and being. With such constrictions it is no wonder that so many people desire to escape the strait jacket of having to be utterly "normal" and seek entry into the magical world of Harry Potter. The Harry Potter stories is like finding the door to the Room of Requirement enabling us to enter the co-existing world of wonderment.

Going even deeper however, is the nature of our own existence and how it is treated by others. In the Dursley household Harry is treated wretchedly. He is made to sleep in the cubby under the stairs among the spiders, barked at and treated like a slave echoing the life of Cinderella. And then, like the fairy god-mother in Cinderella, Hagrid shows up and changes everything in Harry's life. Unbeknownst to Harry, he is the most famous person in the magical world as "the boy who lived."

So along with the secret wish that magic is real and that a magical world exists, there is also the deepest and most secret desire to be thought of as special, that somewhere inside of us is a unique gift or talent hitherto unknown and undiscovered however reluctant we may be to actually find it. In our own world are all those rags to riches stories or of someone being "discovered" by a movie producer. And so Harry Potter represents not only our own desire to escape the "normal" world of muggles but to also discover the true nature and value of our own life in the grand arena of time and space we call existence and then to find our place in it in relation to the others we find here. This desire marks the entry point for all who have ever sought and traveled the path of spiritual awakening. Welcome to Hogwarts.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows

Just so I have it, I'm posting my comment to a blog entry at:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/07/22/deathly-hallows/
The blog and the comments are very good reading too.

# NeoLotus on Jul 31st, 2007 at 11:31 am

Since everyone else has done a great job of commenting I only have a few things to add from a non-Western cultural point of view.

The scene when Harry goes to meet Voldemort in the forest to allow himself to be killed reminded me of the scene in “Shogun” when Blackthorn is about to commit seppuku but is then reprieved. It is also, to some extent, reminiscent of the scene in “The Last Samurai” when Katsumoto is dying and says of the cherry blossoms that “they are all perfect.” Charles Taylor’s review of “The Sorcerer’s Stone” is spot on in regards to these stories being deeply rooted in the here and now. Just the act of breathing is a miracle that is thrown away in our daily lives until we know how few breaths are left. Harry’s recognition of this, whether Rowling knew it or not, is very Buddhist in its syncretism with East Asia.

For those who keep insisting that something “otherworldly” or “sublime” must somehow be part of this story, well, people see what they want to see unless they have learned to see what is. I truly believe that Rowling is showing how none of that is necessary in order for good and evil to exist in the world. As Dumbledore says at the end of Chamber that it is our choices that determine who we are when Harry so desperately wanted to be in house Gryffindor rather than house Slytherin. Voldemort exemplified all that is evil by killing Harry’s parents. For what?

And in the explanation of Voldemort’s life in Half-Blood Prince, we see that it was the events and circumstances of his life that created the monster he eventually became. And in Buddhist (karmic) fashion the hallmarks of house Slytherin were of a propensity to cruelty and indifference born from a wizard who thought himself superior to others. As the recipient of that legacy born from the most egregiously authoritarian circumstances of Tom Riddle’s mother and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father…..well, one does not need Satan to explain the stupidity that humans are capable of. All that is needed, as Mencius says, is for there to be a lack of empathy and commiseration for a human to not be a human. Dr. Gilbert during the Nuremburg trials bears this out when he realizes that evil is the absence of empathy. The creature under the chair at the end of The Deathly Hallows shows precisely what a life born without the benefit of and without the capacity for love and empathy looks like.

If there is indeed a God, what people need to understand about it is that it is not the name or the book or the words that matters. What matters is whether we follow what God (if there is one) etched in our hearts about liking kindness over cruelty. The Malfoys, Narcissa particularly, makes that point very deeply at the beginning of The Half-Blood Prince when she begs Snape to save her child’s life. Bellatrix provides the counter-point to emphasize those who do not know what to truly value in the time we have been given between birth and death. The curt nod of Draco on the platform in the epilogue is the recognition that his own son would not exist had it not been for the defeat of Voldemort.

In the end, this story is in fact a morality tale stripped of unprovable dogmatic belief systems in favor or the more practical realities of living in the here and now and what we do with the time we are given. It will provide the surest method of critical judgement for a whole generation of children (and perhaps some adults) to know whether a doctrine is worthy of following or not.

Think about that the next time you vote. (My apologies. I just had to throw that in there.)

Zen Politics, part one

The thing about Japanese Zen is its minimalism. The whole business of Buddhism generally is to clear away the junk and gunk in our minds so that we can see more clearly what actually is. The effect of Zen is to reduce clutter and achieve focus. In the movie "The Last Samurai" is the observation of "too many minds" when the American was learning to use the sword. In other words, the mind was scattered being focused on too many things that had nothing do with being effective with the sword.

American government and governance has "too many minds." It is neither coherent nor focused on issues the average person cares about. The government's raison d'etre to serve the people has been subverted to serve very narrow and selfish interests all in hot pursuit of the almighty dollar. In this regard, the greedy are extremely well focused and have indeed achieved their end of creating a government that serves them.

Unfortunately, the current political system is, for all intents and purposes, not on the side of people. They spend all their time playing a shell game with the public pretending to listen and then going back to the business of catering to money.

I find the calls for non-partisanship rather disingenuous as if Democrats and Republicans really do have differing views on anything.

The real line for partisanship has nothing to do with political parties. Rather, is has to do with which side of the people/money equation they are on. In other words, does money serve people or do people serve money? At a tax forum with three state senators yesterday I got as much right-wing whitewash as I would get from any GOPer. There was no concern about the human cost of tax policy even though many in the audience tried to make that point.

More importantly, there was no effort by the senators to partner with the people in the audience to help drive policy in a better direction. We were told instead that Gov. Pawlenty holds all the cards and that the legislators have their hands tied because of an insufficient number of them to override a veto--along partisan lines--and gave a litany of apologetics for the GOPers in not voting against a GOP governor.

I find something fundamentally wrong with people who adhere so much to a label that they are willing to check their brain into the delusion world at the cost of real lives.

So, back to Zen politics and a redefinition of partisanship.

I think it is time to do away with the labels that allow wolves in sheep's clothing to fleece the American population. Third parties don't have much a chance, and they'd just be another label anyway. Still, we need something. What exactly it could or should be, I don't know.

There was at one time a Populist Party. There are still all manner of parties listed. The problem is developing enough of a critical mass of popular support to dislodge the ticks bloating themselves on the body politic who call themselves "representatives."

It could also be very possible that there is no way to change or reform what we have now. Those things will have to wait for the catastrophic failure of the entire system before anything new can arise from its ashes.

Our forefathers tried their best to create a system that could endure. But the culture and the prejudices they brought with them from England were too great to be overcome. The aristocracy and demagogues have done their best to ensure that the true American dream of equality, liberty, and consent of the governed would never be made real. Now, we face a coup d'etat where the sovereignty of the people is vested in a single person under a dictatorship as made explicit in NSPD-51.

I don't know how to teach people to be better judges of character. What I do know is that we need a LOT more neighbor to neighbor on-the-ground discussions about policy and who those policies will benefit.

For my part, and for as much as I have called myself a Democrat for most of my voting age years, it is clear that times we live in now are a lot less about which party a person identities with and a lot more about whether they are in fact feeling and thinking human beings.

We don't need an ownership society, we need a give a shit society.