New Spiritual Musing: "The Outlander Mystique"

The Outlander Mystique

            I have an idea forming in the back of my mind. I say the back of my mind, because it makes more credible sense this way; but actually, I feel the idea forming about a foot above and behind the back of my head in my energy field, an idea that is much too deep to explore in today’s spiritual musing. So, if I may, let me simply expand upon what I think is going on with the formation of this as yet unapprehended idea for a spiritual musing...

         

I’ve been caught up in the Outlander series on Neflix this past week (I’m three quarters of the way through season 2, and I understand season 3 has just been released), and so intrigued was I by the author Diana Gabaldon who wrote the Outlander novels that I had to do a Google search to find out how she came about writing this incredible historical romance with a mesmerizing time-travelling science fiction plot twist; and what I learned about her creative process confirmed my insights into the mystifying art of creative writing.

The idea forming in my mind  has allowed me to witness my creative unconscious at work as it assembles the archetypal energies that are coalescing into the idea for my spiritual musing on the numinous mystery of creative writing, something that has intrigued every writer whose characters just appear to take over a story, like Diana Gabaldon’s Claire Randall did in her first Outlander novel which grew into a series; and given what I’ve seen so far in the movie adaptation of her novel in seasons 1 & 2, I believe I have been given a serious glimpse into how the creative unconscious works for the evolution of the individual soul, in this case Diana Gabaldon who was called to creative writing unexpectedly.

Gabaldon was a university professor for twelve years before she got the call to write a historical novel, “for practice, just to learn how,” with no intention of showing it to anyone; but she didn’t know where to set her historical novel, and then fate kicked in.

By “coincidence” (I put the word in quotation marks, because I’ve come to believe that coincidences happen to connect one’s outer journey in life with their inner journey to wholeness and completeness), she caught a rerun episode of the Doctor Who TV series called “The War Games.” One of the Doctor’s companions was a Scot from around 1745, a young man about 17 years old called Jamie McCrimmon who provided the initial inspiration for Gabaldon’s main male character, James Fraser, and for her novel’s mid-18^th Century Scotland setting. Gabaldon decided to have “an Englishwoman to play off all those kilted Scotsmen,” but her female English character  “took over the story and began telling it herself, making smart-ass remarks about everything,” thus providing Gabaldon with the idea of time-travel because her character Claire sounded like a modern woman, which gave her first Outlander novel the mystifying element that allowed her to expand her story into a whole series which explore the sweet joys and harrowing sorrows of romantic love through time travel, a truly fascinating concept that has captured the imagination of twenty-five million readers and more viewers of the television series; but where did Claire Beauchamp Randall come from? That’s the mystery…

Something about Outlander fascinated me, not in the usual sense of a good story, but something more serious, something deeper than the plot twists which were brilliantly woven into the storyline, like the psycho-sexual metaphor of British imperialism symbolized in the perverse relationship that Captain “Black Jack” has with the young Scot with the “magnificent body,” Claire’s husband Jamie Fraser; the story implied a historical connective tissue that spelled out a karmic link from one lifetime to the next, and then it hit me—that was the implicit logic of the natural process of soul-making that the author was called upon to introduce to the world through Claire’s romantic connection with the past and future.

This, of course, presupposes the principles of karma and reincarnation which are artfully implied in the Outlander series through the concept of time travel, how decisions made in one lifetime have karmic consequences in the future—which seems to be the driving engine of the whole Outlander series with Claire’s love for her husband Jamie in mid-18^th Century Scotland and her fraught marriage to Frank in mid-20^th Century England, and no matter how hard Claire and Jamie try to change the future they are doomed to fail because karma has inevitable consequences; which suggest that the writer’s imagination is guided by an omniscient guiding principle not only to facilitate the writer’s individuation in their destined journey to wholeness and completenss, but the reader’s as well by providing them with the karmic wisdom of the stories, a symbolic wisdom that writers themselves are oblivious to until their creative unconscious works it out through writing, which in Diana Gabaldon’s case is a historical romance with an ingenious plot twist.

By paralleling Claire’s two loves, Jamie in 18^th Century Scotland and Frank in 20^th Century England (and America), the connective tissue of love can be seen in all of it’s glorious and mystifying manifestations as it flows through time—just as karma does. An incredible story and invaluable message about choices and consequences, but much too deep for today’s spiritual musing. And that’s the mystique of the Outlander that I simply had to explore.

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