As Is The Feeling,
So Is The Result.

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No matter their medium of expression, artists use themes. Individual artists repeatedly use themes they like and appropriate for use themes by other artists. This is normal and natural.

There is a universal theme that can be identified from its use across time, personalities, cultures, religions, media. It is the trinitarian theme of happiness, loss, then restitution to happiness.

They fall in love, something comes between them, they get back together again, united in love more firmly now than ever before.

In religious literature and artistic articulation, this universal theme deploys in language indicating three phases of what is actual human experience.

Heaven, Phase 1, sweetness and light, is where and when everything is right.

Some untoward event, Phase 2, often depicted as a Fall — because that is what it feels like existentially — makes something wrong, felt as an estrangement, an alienation, a distance unbridgeable, an obstacle insurmountable. Heart, mind, and body suffer pain, torment, uncertainty, dis-ease.

A healing event, Phase 3, intervenes — unexpectedly — and suddenly separation is not felt, union or togetherness is felt, and happiness floods back into the heart, mind, and body. Dis-ease flies hence, to where, one cares not, because has experienced dis-ease an un-natural condition of the heart, mind, and body. One feels like Heaven, one’s true home, is regained, only more so. Restitution is to a condition felt existentially to be more intensely satisfying, more convincing, more precious even, that was the heavenly condition only dimly remembered during the times of suffering in lonely sorrow.

Gestation – Birth – Release

Christianity discourses regarding these phases of experience as Creation, Fall / Death, and Resurrection (God The Father, Jesus The Christ, God The Holy Spirit). The Hindu Epics Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita proceed on the same universal theme, each through a unique story, but both built on one and the same theme: happiness and ease, loss forcing hardship in exile, providential and combative restoration to even sweeter happiness and ease.

Every religion worthy of the name, whichever media its practitioners deploy to articulate a commended existential hagiography, rests in this same universal theme, with its three mutually-integral parts or phases.

Secular discourse and personal memory also occur using the same thematic structure. The past was elysian, the demagogue or memory promises escape from some present, improvident struggle the demagogue or memory knows how to overcome and will then return all and sundry to an even more elysian future if one supports pays loves follows listens to votes for sleeps with appeases the demagogue’s or memory’s desires.

Hollywood could not exist without this universal theme. The bright boys in berets use the theme for romantic and dramatic scripts, practically every one of them. Even tragic scripts use the theme: if only X had done so and so, it is said or implied, maybe Y would not have had to happen and Z would have been a happy outcome for X. Preminger’s murder of Porgy and Bess followed that application of the theme. My favorite romantic script is An Affair To Remember.

Although the Sonata form altogether relies in the universal trinitarian theme — A B A+ — the structure of the Largo of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto Number 4 exudes it in conspicuously florid profusion.

In their uniquely toxic and seemingly permanent arrogance, Christianity’s cultured despisers point to the universality of this theme — comprising Origin, Fall, and Restoration — as indication that Christian piety and its articulation — scripture and theology — are artifacts of culture and fetid, senescent ones at that. All manner of cultures have a dying and rising god, they say, a paradise lost and a paradise regained. So what? Get over it!

The arrogant academician and the demented demagogue have this in common: that they posit the fall phase of the theme — whether possible or actual — as a fall from power, theirs, as embodied by something which frustrates them.

In contrast, the serious person, theologian or layman, posits the fall phase of the theme — whether possible or actual — as a fall from grace, God’s, as embodied by the worlds around them.

For the one, loss (fall) involves mundane affairs, others, one’s status in a group. For the other, loss involves distance from contentment, loss of internal bliss, alienation from the specific matrix of [divine] love which makes specifically one’s own life smooth and enjoyable.

Alienation from peers (creatures) drives the one. Alienation from home (God) drives the other. One regards birth as an evil dispensation to be opposed, to the death. The other regards birth as a blessed opportunity to make tracks home, Godward. Effects of these orientations could not be more existentially, culturally, educationally, politically, or economically consequential.

The universal presence of this theme points to the universal sameness of human yearning and therein the true basis of humanity’s unity.

Consider China’s self-history and articulation thereof by the PRC’s regnant regime. Notably, two political parties currently afflicting Americans — Democrats and pre-Trump Republicans — share the same hagiography as the PRC’s, only theirs is about themselves.

In both iterations, the narrative runs: a position of solely legitimate and absolutely global power and privilege has been lost to barbarians and must be regained, and rightfully so, by restoring to them even more solely legitimate and absolutely global power and privilege than were owned previously by the narrative’s makers.

Collectivism / Communism
is a selfish, McNasty religion.

Left lying unattended on the seminar table is this question:

How can a solely legitimate and absolutely global power and privilege be lost to barbarians in the first place?

Moslems were compelled to face this question when Napoleon landed at Alexandria, put ashore, and marched up the Levantine coast . . . then was seconded with like insouciance by the British!

The answer is: outside God there is no solely legitimate and absolutely global power, but inside God there is one and only one, and its name is love. Christianity’s cultured despisers are stupid, thamasic. So are religion’s cultured despisers, whatever their bête noire.

Its universality attests the universal theme’s puissance and unerring use in all existential hagiographies, even secular ones.

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• Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, December 25, 1981 /  Daily Email, Sai Inspires: Subscription

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