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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.
We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.
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Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Colour: yellow, Bhayānakam (भयानकं): Horror, terror. Yama. Colour: black
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Archetype → Sage
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To know more is having more keys to doors, but to understand, is to really be free.
The Jungian character archetype that we’re looking at in this monthly story is that of the sage—the pursuer of truth and understanding as the way to real freedom. In this story, we explored the shadow of this archetype through R. M. —the sharp politician who underestimates the possibilities and viewpoints beyond his sensible frameworks. The mood we wanted to create in this story is that of wonder, or adbūta, identified in the eastern aesthetic theory of rasa. We used the mood bhayānaka, or terror, as an undertone to give more dimension to the story.
In this reading list, you will find books, films and other works that shaped this story through interesting ideas exploring the process of unravelling that takes place during death. This disengagement of the mind’s many layers during death became a context for us to explore the shadow of the sage archetype that values understanding the truth more than anything. Events and stories like the assassination of S.W.R.D—one of Sri Lanka’s sharpest politicians—and Oppenheimer—one of the masterminds behind the atomic bomb—speaking about what it felt like to understand the gravity of what they have created, are links to exploring a common blind spot of the sage archetype where knowledge is mistaken for actual understanding.
Tibetan Book of the Dead. 14th-century, Padmasambhava.
First Principles of Theosophy. 1921, Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa.
Waking life (2001, R. Linklater. T. Pallotta, J. Smith, A. Walker-McBay, P. West, Thousand Words).
Assassination of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike by the Buddhist priest Talduwe Somarama Thero, Sri Lanka, 1959.
The Republic. 375 BC, Plato.
Sage archetype. 1919, Carl Jung.
Wonder, adbūta rasa.
Terror, bhayānaka rasa.
Oppenheimer on the moment when the gravity of the atomic bomb was first understood. 1965, NBC archives.