Satsang
PODCAST
EPISODE NO.
43

How Loving Science Fiction is like Loving God

universe darshan
May 15, 2017

Can you self-realize if you don’t love science fiction? Shambhavi talks about what has fueled her life-long love affair with science fiction and how those same longings motivate our spiritual practice. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi.


FIRST WORDS FROM THE PODCAST

So I thought I would talk today about something I’ve mentioned before, which is that my love of science fiction is related to my spiritual practice. So I thought I’d talk about why loving science fiction is like loving God.

I’ll start with a story. I grew up in the Cold War. That was my childhood basically. So there were a lot of stories about, you know, nuclear bombs could drop at any moment, stuff like that. I felt that destruction could happen at any moment. We lived in this fairly large house on the edge of a woods, and the woods was very kind of scrappy and bleak. It wasn’t very lush. There was a lot of like, initials carved in trees, stuff like that. The window of my bedroom looked right out on the woods, and there was a radiator right under the window. Sometimes I used to sit on the radiator, I’ve written about this, and I would just try to psychically call aliens. I mean, really with all my heart. It wasn’t even like just a thought. I would literally sit there and with every ounce of non –psychic power that I had I would ask them to come and save us.

The first way that loving science fiction is like loving God, or like loving spiritual practice, or like spiritual longing is that it involves longing. I mean people who really love science fiction experience longing. Longing for something better. Longing for things to be different. Longing to learn something that you don’t know that isn’t ordinary. Longing for the non-ordinary. Some sort of intuition that things are much more rich and vast that what we experience in our everyday lives.

ABOUT THE PODCAST

Satsang with Shambhavi is a weekly podcast about spirituality, love, death, devotion and waking up while living in a messy world.