Collection Of Horror Tales - Chapter 11 The Concept Of This Volumethoughts On The Great Spirit And Harmony

Old Indian legends tell of the Great Spirit or Wakan Tanka, Gitche Manitou, the Creator which is a form of universal spiritual force. As the life force flowing through everything in this world, it’s a symbol of harmony and Life. Even the Great Spirit is a name that doesn’t really describe it. Indians believe that the Great Spirit is the origin of the world. But it is something not comprehensive for humans. That’s why some tribes believe that even giving it a name makes false because words limit the truth. If you give something a name, you must define it but if u can’t you’re imprisoned in a paradox. Nevertheless I still would like to make a try on explaining my thoughts on the thing called Great Spirit.

Now if you think about the Great Spirit as a symbol of harmony. And if you think of life force in in the absence of a better alternative, as a Form of harmony, you can’t go around explaining harmony in itself, when you think of the Great Spirit. Harmony in general is the connection between aspects that are in synchronization with each other. Meaning the connection has to complete the aspects and not disrupt them in their nature. The connection has to be their very own Nature. Now if you think of a connection between two aspects it is still relatively easy. One note follows another making a pleasant sound. If you do the same thing with 3 or 4 notes it’s still pretty easy but it gets harder on an obvious scale. Now if you try to make a harmony between hundreds of notes only musical geniuses can achieve a complete harmony.

It stays the same for other things. Connections between two aspects are easy but if you have millions or trillions of different aspect forming a harmony is not comprehendible by humans. Now if you see our world or life at itself as a form of harmony it makes sense why people need a form of God or something similar to explain this harmony. The explanations that were given over the course of time are mostly relatively bad in their approach. The Great Spirit in contrast is not one of those approaches to this problem. It’s just the acknowledged the existence of harmony.

Now, coming back to the original genre of this story, I was asking myself, if life and the world itself have a high level of harmony, then how is it that there are still so many Disharmonies everywhere?

I found the answer in the concept of Ying and Yang. Is harmony only a connection that doesn’t interrupt the nature of things or is there also an aspect of harmony that is the exact opposite? Is disharmony also an aspect of harmony? And if you think further can harmony even exist without disharmony?

Isaac Newton already said that every force has an opposite force of the same strength.

If you take harmony you have for example life as harmony you have death as its opposite disharmony.

If you follow this string of thought has the Great Spirit as a personification of harmony a side of disharmony?

Here is where the general idea of this storyline comes from. It’s about people making contact with the disharmonious side of the Great Spirit, a side that contains darkness, death and hatred, while still being part of the harmony, part of the world itself. Furthermore it plays with the idea of a greater harmony/disharmony. The idea of achieving a higher level in harmony than the world already has.

Now if you’re interested in my interpretation of the Great Spirit, I recommend you reading the stories of this volume.