Pokemon and Spirituality
I was reading the lecture The Great Teachers of the World from the Complete works of Swami Vivekananda Vol 4 and was struck by these two passages.
“Because my forefathers did not think this way, shall I sit down quietly and gradually lose my sense of feeling and my own thinking faculties? I may as well be dead! And what is life worth if we have no living ideas, no convictions of our own about religion?
Here Swamiji denounces the idea of doing what the generation before you did because “that’s just the way it is”; he compares it not truly living and thinking if all you do is follow what came before you. And he leads into this following passage,
“So think something! Struggle Godward! Never mind if you fail, never mind if you get hold of a queer theory. If you are afraid to be called queer, keep it in your own mind — you need not go and preach it to others. But do something!”
where he says that the only way to truly grow spiritually is to try something new, even if you are wrong or it only applies to you you are still learning from it and thus are moving forward.
But trying something new is hard, and change is scary. I was fixed on these two passages because this is something that I know conceptually, change is the only way new things can happen but it’s still not something I’m always comfortable with.
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So what does any of this have to do with Pokemon? Well like any kid born in the 90s, I grew up loving Pokemon and recently got back into Pokemon GO. Now gen 3 was the last generation I played beginning to end and afterwards I started getting in the mindset of every Pokemon game that came after the ones I liked was lazy and a grab for more money. And this isn’t just the case for Pokemon, it applies to any series or game; and I’m sure I’m not alone, where you start thinking the version you liked most is the right one and everything after it is bad. So I started thinking. Accepting change or making a change doesn’t have to start with something huge, it can begin with something as little as starting to accept a game or show or book you like changing. Because when get comfortable with change you are less scared to then make a change.
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