I recently came across the term "imaginative overlay", which Yann Martel used as a substitute for the word "spiritual". He notes that the word spiritual connotes religion so much these days that most rational and scientific minds avoid it. So, in order to communicate to people thoughts on his secular beliefs, (untainted by dogma, history, and institution of religions) he now uses the term imaginative overlay. I.e. someone's imaginative overlay for life may involve believing in daily doses of pineapple and love + the existence of a collective unconscious . . .

In a way I'm saddened by this. As a friend pointed out recently, imaginative overlay sounds rather sterile. I like the word spiritual. I feel that I have been so obsessed by words and their exact meaning and semantics that I've missed the point somehow. I really feel that my life has been spiritually vacuous over the past few years . . . reading too many non-fiction books, searching for definitions and meaning through the intellect, overvaluing knowledge, and looking for linear processes.

Enter Herman Hesse.

I read Demian and Siddhartha by Hesse years ago. Both books really just confused me. They were given to me as presents by two different people. One a stranger, the other a close friend at the time. Until I re-read them, I hardly remembered the content, and the point of the books seemed like a blurry fog to me. It was strange because the narrative and stories seemed so simple. I just didn't get it.

When I began to acknowledge the spiritual vacuum in me, I picked up Siddhartha haphazardly, mostly because of its title (I remember that little from the first reading). It was probably one of the only books I had on my bookshelf that had anything remotely to do with spirituality.

Siddhartha, when I read it again a month ago, transformed me. I cried because the story resonated with me so deeply. It was so simple as a narrative and as a story; yet, it was incredibly deep and rich beneath the surface. The underlying spirituality of the simple story was like a whole different world, or seeing the world through completely different eyes. It felt profound and amazing in a very personal way.

I don't know how Hesse does it, but he manages to convey something as non-intellectual as spirituality in a way that just makes sense. I feel like he wrote about me and my life, my questions, my journey. I also feel like I'm committing a crime against Hesse's talent with these completely insufficient and inadequate descriptions of his work. I'm just so excited to have scratched the surface of my very own personal spirituality. It's really nice to have an imaginative overlay for the world, or my world at least. There really is just so much more than what's on the surface . . . much juicier this way.