The Harvest author’s film background has given him license to interpret first, second, and third person views with the technical language of the cinema. Close shots to long shots, and constant zoom ins and zoom outs create a cinematic effect which mimics not only the personal consciousness of the different observers, but also the collective consciousness of the human race as well as inner and outer space beings.

Indeed in the journey from monologue to myth and first person to third person, myth is sometimes disguised as interior monologue in Harvest with all kinds of unsual transitions and twists. This movie effect creates both a visceral and intellectual atmosphere that builds on itself organically. An artistic and cognitive texture is being slowly built strand by strand almost like a DNA helix slowly unwinding outward and upward.

All stories are first person, but there are many different kinds of first person angles. Monologue’s limits are the building blocks of more expansive techniques. “ Moby Dick “ by Herman Melville like Harvest touches every part of the narrative spectrum and unlike Harvest even moves into exposition and essay. Multiple filmic shots and more narrative styles add texture to a story.

Each progressive technique becomes more comprehensive and abstract and thus takes in more psychological territory. More parts of the mind are engaged as more and more materials are compiled by the narrator from more and more remote resources. A bigger mandala with more components is created. There is more and more material and more ways to express it.

The narrator becomes less and less confined to a particular place of telling and being listened to, while also becoming farther and farther removed from the time and place of events narrated. The language may remain concrete, but the narrator FLOATS more and more freely while the narrator’s vantage point implies greater selectivity and reorganization of his original information. Also the narrator’s audience demands an increasingly universal style.

There is a linguistic and cognitive expansion in Harvest as the journey proceeds from Europe to Asia and ultimately the mandalic center of the planet in the Swyambhu chapter. As the narrator moves across the planet and up the charka ladder the narrator also leaves the solar system and moves on into bigger and bigger galactic horizons. All in order to gain crucial distance. One can almost say that Harvest is a holographic kind of work with the parts of the whole expanding and being documented symultaneously as the work AS A WHOLE grows and expands. The mandala is seen from multiple angles. The reader is taken in and out of its rooms with close and long shots.

Narration techniques recapitulate the evolution of speech not unlike a child developing its own cognitive and linguistic powers of self-identity. The child moves from unrefined and personalized forms of speech to an adult speech that is more increasingly refined and which is able to take on more and more abstract cognitive forms.

The teller, the told to and the told about in children’s discourse often has no boundaries. It is a thinking aloud solo form of discourse. A from of speech least adapted to others. The speaker, listener, and subject overlap in a sometimes confusing sort of way. Adults start separating the different spheres of narration to accommodate increasingly remote audiences and subjects. The “ I “ begins to talk more to a “ you. “ Distance increases. Monologue to diary to publication of documents concludes the SEPERATION. The adult is finally in the realm of public discourse. Colloquial improvisation is replaced by literary composition. The speaker’s relation to the subject becomes primary. First and third person’s appear: I/now and I/then. Self-referral becomes less as direct relation to events becomes more remote. All becomes second hand language.

Past and present selves evolve to experience about other past and present selves. Time and space are breached with other channels. The narrator may still be known, but needs help from others to tell a story. Then even his own identity disappears later on and there is less revelation about sources of information nor relationships to others. Anonymity invades. Third person narration now rules and becomes more and more impersonal. Children have now become gods.

Self-discourse leads to discourse with others and then all. With each stage of distance language, logic, rhetoric, and organization change to suit a more communal audience. Subjects become distilled and accessible through a far flung system of communal knowledge. Myth replaces monologue because myth condenses cultural experience. I speak about myself as someone else, then about others as if they were me and finally others without reference to me. Passion leads to compassion and then finally dispassion. Harvest never quite get’s to this final phase because it is not an impersonal manuel about meditation and the human condition. But it certainly starts pointing in this direction.

The writing process often mimics the learning process. Learning is a DE-CENTERING activity. Children like having a limited point of view. We achieve de-centering by adapting ourselves to things and people outside ourselves and by adopting points of view initially foreign to us. This is not a painless process. Accomodation and assimilation amounts to expanding one’s perspective despite the danger of psychological overload. This is White Stress. One does not become less of oneself, but one’s identity still expands into an enlargened cognitive sphere. By hearing out the world the narrator is centered in the middle of communal consciousness. This is why Harvest adheres to a strategy of multiple camera shots from multiple angles and with multiple zoom in and zoom out strategies.

Harvest uses self-centered monologues in different cognitive spaces to increase and jog the reader’s awareness in a kind of literary jujitsu. Persona; monologue is processed in new and unconventional ways to include other points of view. This unconventional de-centering is a difficult and life-long process. Harvest tackles this challenge in unusual deceptively simple kinds of ways.

A good metaphor for Harvest of Gems is on the cover of the paperback. It is an exploration of the mandala parts to experience the entire mandala itself. Comprehension and appreciation by the reader occurs spontaneously to the text. Intuition is developed and it can be suddenly swift and deep. The intense individual experience of a few trees gives profound insight to the entire forest. Multiple views magnetize each other and amplify the larger field they are imbedded in. While still retaining their own identity.

In Harvest life and literature mirror each other and reality and imagination have an interplay that can be very precise and organic and at other times obscure and out of focus. Literature mirrors not just human behavior. But also human modes of learning and communication. Harvest teaches as it entertains. Fiction, discourse, and growth illuminate each other. Stories are systems of communication and knowledge and are also about such systems. In an endless regression multiple stories within stories help to stimulate and expand the mind. Discrepancies and adjustments of perspective are the core of all story-telling. There is a feedback process involved because stories are living systems. Irony and harmony, dissonance and consonance are forever fused when speaker, listener, and subject interact in different spacetimes and as different organisms in different environments all simultaneously co-evolving as different forms of sentient matter not only with one another, but with formless kinds of sentience as well. These collisions provide the context for a radical view of existence itself. One that is still alien to the west, but not to the east. The west is still basically a materialistic and reductionist culture. Harvest rises to the challenge and Two Short Stories plunges even deeper into an expanded reality with no apology to the reader or audience whatsoever.

The history of fiction itself from myth to modern writing is terribly illuminating especially when the narrative spectrum under discussion is REVERSED from ancient to modern instead of modern to ancient as has been the case in this discussion. In ancient literature humans were depicted very differently compared to humans in the last four hundred years of modern history. Story-telling has gone from being objective to subjective, from pointing at the universal to pointing to the particular, and most important of all the role of hero has been transformed to that of anti-hero. Indeed, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, and Beowulf were depicted as super-beings with super powers in the ancient days. The Harvest narrator still has great personal failings and cannot be seen as superhuman, yet he is constantly surrounded by super-beings.

In older times romances and folk-tales blended the actual and the magical as normal humans interacted with sorcerers and spirits. The entire world was enchanted. This reflected the culture open to forces beyond itself. This came to an end with modern literature. Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a protagonist cut-off from cosmic and supernatural forces while living in a culturally determined environment. By the time Kafka arrives on the in the early 20th century the protagonist is cut-off even from society and is festering intensely in his own isolation. The atomization is now complete. All meaning in life has been put into question in a spiritless and now de-humanized universe.

Harvest of Gems starts to transform modern fiction by challenging these modern assumptions even while putting into use techniques of modern fiction. Communal narrators of myth do not go into the inner thoughts of their characters because the archetypal minds and actions of cosmic beings need no inner point of view. Myths and epics condense and transmit an entire heritage of knowledge and wisdom within the public domain of collective and universal consciousness.

Harvest of Gems is still a modern work emphasizing the individual’s inner world. Freud would recognize in Harvest some aspect of the personal unconscious, but Jung would see a collective awareness in the work as well. Celine, Becket, Dostayevsky are all Kafka’s kin and they would certainly recognize the individualist echo in Harvest of Gems but they would not necessarily be in harmony with it’s transpersonal content. A content which is essentially a positive one.

As fictional characters evolved during the Middle ages and the Renaissance from types to the kind of individualized people found in Chaucer and Shakespeare these characters had to speak more for themselves. Departing from a universal perspective narrative broke down into a multiplicity of individual vantage points. Harvest is part of this legacy. Third person ruled fiction until the 17th century when first person techniques started to invade plays and third person narratives. But did not constitute whole stories themselves. By the time of the Renassaince and Romantic period fiction became captured by first person techniques. Voyages to exotic places in the form of letters and diaries pioneered this technique. Gulliver’s travels by Swift resurrected this trend. Harvest certainly borrows from this evolution. So does Kerouac’s “ On the Road “ which is also a travel story. But like Harvest possibly verging on myth through monologue. James Joyce’s “ Ulysses. “ by its very title also approached this new trend, but in a far more sophisticated way.

The short story in the 19th century advanced first person techniques beyond monologue. The modern novel was not far behind. Subjective and vernacular narration was fused. Twain, Gogol, and de Maupassant showed the way. Dostayevsky too. American writers between the wars with an ear for common speech and dialects created short story monologues as Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner adapted interior monologue to the novel. Kerouac and Salinger are descendants of this western literary evolution. Harvest pushes this experimentation further by encorporating an adolescent interior monologue with an ear for other English dialects while exploring Buddhist ideas with vivid descriptions of shamanic and psychic worlds. Indeed Harvest is a new and strange literary hybrid both in content and style. It is a work that has been incubating not only in the meditation room and on the modern pilgrimage trail. But also in the shamanic planes of the invisible, digital arenas of an emerging wired and ecologically conscious Earth.

Harvest is a global and Buddhist form of modern prose with modern western techniques that start to stray into the mythological and liturgical realms of the human mind. Harvest is a showcase of the old and new western literary worlds as they join hands and explore ancient Asian mind sciences in an increasingly global and politically posy-modern context. Harvest is a transitional work struggling to define itself and its historic era by creating a new cultural mandala through unusual juxtapositions and fusions of its individual components as they conflict and emerge within the new global mandala. Harvest must remain an unfinished work. A work in progress complete with paradox, contradiction and occasional prophecy. Harvest gives no quarter to institututional critics as it pursues its urgent mission into the future and is at peace with this unfinished process.

Harvest and especially Two Short Stories are ambitious work as they attempt to chronicle the very evolution of human consciousness. Global literature has evolved from mythic stories to interior monologue, from a collective consciousness to a personal one reflecting the political shift from kingly theocracy to secular “ democracy. “ In the modern era the individual demanded more personal freedom. Literature also separated itself from scripture and liturgy as its subject shifted from the divine comedy to the human one. From sacred literature to profane literature and from poetry to prose. From classical languages like Hebrew, Greek, and Latin to national languages like English. French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German. Now even national languages are being dumped in favor of local speech. Rap is going global. Readers must assess and interpret these trends for themselves.

Harvest has attempted to employ all the resources of modern literature in order to transmit a liturgical and mythological spirit. Harvest is going back to the past in a modern way and its vision is global too. Two Short Stories even more so. In our post-modern world an original unity has been broken down into fragments corresponding to alienation, freedom, and anxiety. Psychological break-down and cultural disintegration all are reflected in today’s global literature. It could be just a growth phase to a newer and more mature collective awareness. The Harvest author is tempted to speculate the modern era ushered in by the west could be a necessary and temporary re-infantualization of global culture.

In the growth of the child an immature unity ultimately leads to seperation and individualization as the child learns to socialize. In a handful of individuals this phase sometimes leads to an even deeper form of maturity. A re-integration with the world occurs. The child who has become an adult walks further into sainthood.

Child-like fantasies of unlimited freedom without responsibility lead to hardened adult visions of imposed responsibility and social confinement. But also a raised consciousness needed for future self-realization. People can grow both ways at once. It becomes a massive voyage from womb to the outer universe. It is a voyage where we need to accommodate to our own personal divinity. Psychological and spiritual survival becomes just as critical material survival. We must continually enlargen our contexts while retaining our identity. This is the major challenge of being human. It is the ultimate tight-rope act.

The saint goes back to the beginning, but on another plane where all paradoxes are resolved. Self-reliant and self-realized individuals who have out-grown egocentricity and thno-centricity are on the way to becoming global and universal citizens. This is the Teilhardian worldview. It is also the Buddhist and systems view. It is the kabbalist and Vedantan view as well. All are one. The sum of all points of view creates a meta-perspectice in both fiction and “ reality “ which always must mirror each other. We are all made from the same psychic tissue.

The trees of life and knowledge combine and so do the divine and human comedies as consciousness expands in both of the directions that make-believe and story-telling reflect. The inner and outer worlds fuse and finally are perceived as vanishing vantage points. This is the “ IT “ of Harvest.