The Vibration of Mysterious Wings

What began as a survival mechanism in the brutally difficult first two-thirds of the last month turned into a kind of daily ritual. Right before or after lunch, I sit on my terrace in a chair facing the sun. I meditate with my eyes closed, clearing my mind, watching the variations of colors, ranging from pale gold to dark reddish purple through the lids of my eyes. I sat today, listening to the wind rush through the palms and feeling it upon my face, half-aware of the colors, warmed by the sun washing over me. So unlike my mind in the last three months or so, I was in a state of tranquil bliss.

I was startled by a hum and vibration of air that almost brushed by right ear. Thinking at first it was some dangerous insect, I jerked up and opened my eyes. Immediately I recognized what it had been, and as confirmation saw the hummingbird shoot off into the air and out of sight. I suppose I couldn’t help my reaction.

But I still feel a lesson was being shown to me. If I had stayed still and simply opened my eyes, I would have been rewarded with the presence of a hummingbird hovering so close I could touch it. Perhaps it was my stillness, within me and without, that drew it near. But then I reacted in fear. When we are afraid, the beauty of the universe shies away from us. If we have the composure to be still, to watch and listen, when encountering something new and strange, we may be given the gift of a wondrous sight, maybe even a revelation. Life, the reality operating behind the scenes of the material world, is trying to engage us, to reveal itself. We just have to not react in fear. We just have to be still and wait and watch, at least for a moment. Who knows what may be revealed to us?

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #26, Featuring My Story "The Blue Lamp"

My fantasy adventure short story, The Blue Lamp, is now available to read online in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #26!

Here’s what the editor of the magazine has to say:
“Adventure fiction in the classic style, Zoltan’s tale will take you from the mundane and into a world of magic and mystery not seen since the glory days of the pulps. In addition to being a great writer, Mr. Zoltan is a fine artist and his illustration from the story is included.”

The story has already been favorably reviewed by Black Gate and Tangent online magazines. HFQ #26 also features stories by J.R. Restrick and Jon Byrne.

More about The Blue Lamp:
The Blue Lamp is a thrilling tale of those two adventurers, poet swordsman Dareon Vin, and his companion, the Indari warrior known as Blue.

When Blue goes missing in the city of Merth for two days (a difficult feat, when you’re six-and-a-half feet tall and covered in blue tattoos), Dareon’s search for his friend leads him to Ravel’s Exquisite Emporium, where he becomes prey to an unusual predatory salesman. Meanwhile, Blue fights for his life and perhaps his very soul, with the aid of Malika, a dancer from Khulan, against an otherworldly foe that is no less than omnipotent.

When is danger the safest path? How can you become victorious in a fight you cannot win?

Join Dareon and Blue and find out, in THE BLUE LAMP!

Talent Is Overrated

People overemphasize the idea of talent. Being born with talent is like being given a pair of running shoes. That's all. Then, you have to train for years and run countless races. And, when you start winning races, you know what people say? "You're so talented!"

You are part of a GREAT ADVENTURE

You are part of a GREAT ADVENTURE. You are an integral part of a MAGNIFICENT UNDERTAKING.

I had a mystical experience yesterday in the laundromat. I have had several in my life, some while meditating, some while doing breath work, or on a walk in nature. Never before in a laundromat. I am going to share what I was shown as well as I can, though I hesitate to do so, because it will be misunderstood and the experience was ineffable (beyond words). I am sharing it for you not for myself, because I think what I experienced was about all of us, not me.  It was not an intellectual experience: I felt and perceived something. So, my description will be inadequate, but I hope it will give some sense of hope or inspiration to you. When I use the word “I” in the telling, it refers to you as well, all humans. It was not a perception of something about me, personally.

I felt something welling up from deep within me while I was folding clothes. An upwelling of emotion was accompanied by a hyper aware state (as if I had been asleep and now was awake), and a realization that I am part of (what follow are only metaphors I thought afterward) a great adventure, a magnificent undertaking, an incredible project, a fantastic team, a living thing—this thing that cannot be named, which expresses itself through LIFE in this reality.

By LIFE I mean not only biological life, but, as Dylan Thomas wrote: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” This “thing” (you may call it what you will, but all words, including God, are inadequate) is something that was before and will be after, it is something eternal (not immortal) that is driving through and completely interwoven through the present in this world. I am part of it, integral to it, as is everyone, not through achievement or belief, but because it is your nature. It (and I with it) am eternal, and this
present life is only a phase of the expression of that force or whatever you want to call it. When I leave this plane of existence, what is me will continue on with this “thing”
toward something unimaginably wonderful and fantastic.

In the movie based on the book, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a scene occurs that is a decent illustration of what I experienced. I was going to remove the line “You must leave,” which is not relevant to my experience. But, as I was going to do that I realized, “you must leave” could refer to the fact that we must “die.” And this is why we all must leave at some point. The body is not meant to last, this life is not meant to last. When you leave this body, all the ego and persona and things connected to this world will drop off and what will remain is what is essentially and primally you, something too splendid for our minds to grasp.

And now, the quote:

Dave Bowman: You see, something's going to happen. You must leave.

Heywood Floyd: What? What's going to happen?

Dave Bowman: Something wonderful.

Heywood Floyd: What?

Dave Bowman: I understand how you feel. You see, it's all very clear to me now. The whole thing. It's wonderful.

Artifical Intelligence Is Called That For A Reason

Tim Urban recently wrote a two-part article about Artificial Intelligence and the dangers involved.


I think some of the comments refuting certain points of the article are quite brilliant and I highly recommend reading them. I read about half the article and browsed the rest. I have read Kurzweil. I agree that AI is a danger, because they will be so powerful, but not because they are better than humans. Human intelligence, if taken to include wisdom, intuition, subjective perception, etc. is far, far, far more and different than just processing info power. And, this is a great point someone made which I firmly believe: human intelligence is inextricably woven together with our biology. You cannot have something think like a human unless it is a human. As I said to a friend, we'll end up building an android that will SEEM to act and think and feel like a human, but it's NOT really doing that. It is only a simulation of what a human does, but is something completely different. An incredibly convincing complex "parrot." 

The problem is that some humans, including many of the people who are in the AI field, believe that a human is nothing but a machine with processing power. This is because of a flaw in the thinking of the Western mind that has very much affected our scientific world view: that our biology is actually a weakness, a flaw, "sinful" according to religious thought; that intellect divorced from body (this idea goes all the way back to Plato) is superior to our physicality. THIS is their greatest error. To put it in simple, metaphysical (or even psychological) parlance: the computer has no soul. Why? Because it is not a biological life form, but an artificial construct made by man to imitate a biological life form.

Someday, we may make the mistake of giving machines "human rights" just because some scientist was foolish enough to give the machine a life-like human body and face. What you will see before you is not a being, but something akin to a sociopathic intelligent mannequin that could easily be programmed to smile or cry sad tears while blowing you away with a gun. Some people would rather create a fake mate that does everything you want it to than learn to love a real one. We would be better served to learn to love our fellow humans than to try creating a simulation of one that will do everything we say. Make fantastic machines! By all accounts, do. But don't make fake humans or ones that run human affairs. We will be sorry. The choice IS ours, because that's part of being human. At least it still is for now.


Also, I disagree with some of the comments about future shock (that bringing people from the past becomes more and more shocking to them the closer you get to the present due to ever-increasing speed of technological advances). Despite the scientific/historical propaganda, human cultural evolution does not go in a straight, ever rising line. It goes up and down (and may again if we have a major power failure on the Earth for some reason). We would be just as shocked to go BACKWARD in time to the height of the ancient Egyptian kingdom and see technology and culture that was in ways more advanced than things we have now (we still don't really have the technology and know-how to build one of the great pyramids—until the 1970's, we didn't even have a crane capable of lifting some of the rocks on the site). A clueless percent spending all their time on their little cellphone would be stunned speechless for weeks. Someone from the Middle Ages, which was far less advanced, actually might die of shock.


And, if you brought someone from the 1960s to the present, they would be impressed with some things, but after a few days they would realize, "Oh, things were cooler back in the 60s." Just sayin.'





Instant Success

This morning, I was not looking forward to facing the difficulty of drawing. And I sometimes have difficulty facing the task of writing when it’s not coming easily. Then, I asked myself a question. If I were faced with the Faustian temptation concerning writing and drawing, would I take it? Would I want to skip all the hardship, the sacrifice, the daily work and take instant success as an author and illustrator?

This is a question worth asking oneself. And worth pondering. I took some time to think about it. It's easy to say, "oh, I want to do the noble work, etc." but that's just because you don't actually HAVE the option of the instant success. But what if you really did? I suggest you ask yourself the same question in regard to whatever you're working to master.

I believe the answer you give yourself will tell you whether or not you really want to BE that person you’re trying to become, or whether you just WANT the things that you think go with it. After some serious consideration, I answered that I want to go through the work. Why?

Because the work I must do, the journey I must take to reach that goal, is what changes me. If I don’t want to change, I don’t want to be an artist, because being an artist is a journey of self-transformation. And as I change, my work will change, and my talent will develop into something that will speak to the hearts and minds of people. If you were able to take that shortcut, you would find the reward empty and meaningless, because the true reward is the evolved self. Whenever someone takes a shortcut (takes the Faustian deal), there seems to be a universal force at work or else simply a psychological force (or maybe it is both, or neither) that knows when we have cheated, and it leads to our self-destruction (this is at least partly what the Faust story is about). In the end, we have cheated only ourselves.

Once I realized that I would choose to go through the work, because I know inherently, it makes me a stronger, wiser, richer person, as well as a better artist, I felt more accepting and patient about drawing today.  And being accepting of what one must do now, in the moment, is the key to reducing our suffering and maximizing our focus, which will help to put us in the “flow” experience that all artists seek.

My drawing today turned out decently. It was neither bad nor great. But that’s okay. I was changed by it. And tomorrow, there will be another. And another. The journey is the greatest reward. And if you take it, chances are, you will find yourself on the path you were meant to walk. And I can tell you personally, no reward is greater than that.

The Missing Myth in Modern Fantasy

In Howard Andrew Jones' blogpost, he and Bill Ward discuss Leiber's brilliant tale "Lean Times in Lankhmar, and mention the fact that the character Fafhrd, who appears in the guise of a god, tells his comrade the Mouser that for a moment, he really was that god. This is an incredibly important point not only to this story, but to Leiber's writing in general, as well as some of the other great writers from that golden era of the early to mid twentieth century.

Leiber had an understanding of myth. I don't know if it was mainly from his own reading of myths, Jung and/or Joseph Campbell. What happens to Fafhrd is a mythic event. He is not the god, but he becomes the god for a moment, in a sense. He is a manifestation of universal, eternal forces that are also psychological ones in the human mind. By having Fafhrd claim honestly that he was the god, Leiber maintains mystery, which is the one constant truth that we experience of reality.

I have previously bemoaned before the loss of mystery in fantasy fiction, but it is a problem not just in fiction but with our modern Western society. Notice how the term myth has been changed to mean "a lie." But a myth is actually closer to the opposite. A myth is a metaphor that points to something other than itself, and that other thing is usually some primal truth about reality and the human condition in relationship to that reality. But fundamentalist scientific materialism says everything is either true or false, but what it means is that everything is either a FACT or a LIE. The terrible error in this thinking is that fact and truth can be two different things. This materialistic thinking is, ironically, also found in fundamentalist religion, the most anti-spiritual type of religion that exists. Fundamentalist religious people are so desperate to believe in only facts that they try to claim everything in the Bible isn't just truth, but also a fact (and they claim this despite the contradictions and unbelievable improbabilities in the scriptures). When you remove mythology from religion, all you're left with is a bunch of unlikely stories and bad science.

In most modern fantasy stories (and art), everything is explained. Everything is a fact. Magic systems are explained. Monsters are explained and described in minutest detail. Heroes are too cocksure and in control of their actions. The lack of mystery goes even beyond the content of the stories to the writing itself, which often reads like a Hollywood action film, not literature. Almost no sense of true mystery exists, meaning mystery in the large sense. Another term that could be used is numinous, which is a term coined by Rudolph Otto.

“it has three components. These are often designated with a Latin phrase: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. As mysterium, the numinous is "wholly other"-- entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life. It evokes a reaction of silence. But the numinous is also a mysterium tremendum. It provokes terror because it presents itself as overwhelming power. Finally, the numinous presents itself as fascinans, as merciful and gracious.” (http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln101/Otto.htm)

And, from Wikipedia:
“According to Otto, the numinous experience has in addition to the tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling, a quality of fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel.
The numinous experience also has a personal quality, in that the person feels to be in communion with a wholly Other. The numinous experience can lead in different cases to belief in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the holy and/or the transcendent."

Joseph Campbell referred to this materializing of everything, in the religious sphere, as “concretization.” Symbols are now considered more important as historical facts (Noah really DID fit all the animals in an ark, etc.) and thus have lost their mythic symbolic power, which is where all the meaning lies, and which is what can transform individual lives.

Campbell referred to it, in the artistic sphere, as naturalism.

“Naturalism is the death of the art. And that’s one of the big problems in our American arts, I think, they don’t understand the metaphor. It’s all naturalism.”
“This naturalism in our art world is…all flat-footed prose. And in flat-footed prose there are only two things that are interesting: violence and sex. That’s what it’s come down to. Everything leads up to it and out of it.”

And, that’s what we mostly have in modern fantasy stories. I seldom read anything written after 1980 or so, because it’s all naturalism, all movie script violence, prop room costumes and action oriented plots. But I took the time to read Howard Andrew Jones' novel, The Desert of Souls, and enjoyed it. I think he was able to weave some sense of mystery into that book, some sense of the numinous, of the ancient and unknowable. And what first drew me to it was the original cover by Charles Keegan. That painting wasn’t some posed models or, worse, Photoshopped photos, and it didn’t look like some cheesy movie poster. A sense of mystery pervades the picture in every way: the composition, the colors, the setting, the painterly style. The numinous glowed forth in that painting. The cover, and the story inside, reflected the unknowable, the mysterious. They were, at least a bit, transparent to transcendence (a term coined by Karlfried Graf Durckheim), meaning that the myth, the divine life within you shines forth.

That is what we should seek to do as human beings, and especially as artists. We should seek to create work that is transparent to transcendence. And Leiber’s work, at its best, was.