We humans are blessed with the complex gift of speech and language, which differentiates us from animals. And with that skill we have become story tellers. Everything we learn in youth and all through our lives is based on the stories we tell ourselves or each other. We are all living our lives based on some stories told long ago or perhaps even recently. But whose stories are they and are these stories the full understanding of reality and the facts on the ground, or are they an interpretation, a metaphor or a speculation invented to dominate the narrative and the masses?
It may be hard to answer these questions rationally and objectively, or to be sure of the answers we come up with. They may be more stories. Even facts produced by scientific experiment may be couched in some subjective viewpoint or interpretation which suits the teller of that story. When it comes to stories, the obvious examples are the religions, myths and legends of our past that were handed down to us over the centuries and millennia. Sometimes they were written down and preserved, while at other times they were rewritten or lost in translation. And before the written word, they were handed down by aural reception from speaker to hearer.
In the ancient Vedic culture of India for example, there are massive volumes of pastimes or historical narrations about heroes and representatives of divinity, saintly kings and wise men who lived in long forgotten times or even on other planets and other dimensions. There are so many stories there in the Vedas, that the stories of the other global cultures in their holy books look small and introductory by comparison. Yet whole nations of people throughout whole swathes of time in history have all adopted these stories as gospel, literally. Usually the king or shaman of a tribe adopts the story, and then the subjects have to follow. So they accept the current narrative of that day.
We are then born and hear the story from our parents and simply follow on in the tradition, accepting that as our story, our interpretation of reality. But it is just a story, a label. We buy into it wholesale, as if our life and even our eternal soul depend on it. There may be a need for “suspension of disbelief”, or an acceptance of “cognitive dissonance”, yet we adopt the story as our own and we go to war, fight, kill and die for it. Why, I ask myself?
Sometimes it’s a tribal collective narrative that we are supporting for primarily political or expedient reasons, sometimes we buy into the philosophy, despite its loopholes. But often we don’t know any better in youth so we acquiesce. And when we get older and question more, we are by then too steeped in the story to re-evaluate it, probably out of fear of reprimand, or out of habit, or more often, out of fear of death. Or we don’t want to be seen as the outsider or rebel. We self-police so that we can continue to fit into our society and community.
And basically all of this is built on a foundation of a story, someone’s story, based on irrational, illogical, mythic thinking with no foundation in scientific evidence. In other words we could be living a lie, or perhaps more like an illusion. We could be living under a total misconception of reality. I speak from experience, having grown up one culture, which I readily adopted and proclaimed as my story or truth as a teenager, but soon outgrew when I encountered the vastly more voluminous holy books of the rest of the world. Yet even these sacred texts are full of mythic and magical stories, which no modern man can take at face value, or see as anything more than metaphors or parables that allude to something perhaps transcendent or beyond our words, language and mentality to comprehend. And I accept that. I accept that they are someone’s story, so I appreciate them and learn but I don’t identify with them. I don’t claim any fundamentalist allegiance, nor do I try to fully understand them, or impose them on anyone else.
All the stories of our history are perhaps tainted with lost details, misinterpretations and fabrications, but they all have some insight for us. They may or may not allude to actual historical facts or people, but their message can still be deep and insightful. The details of what is possible or what went on in the distant past may be beyond our limited cultural or scientific understanding. Miracles are simply science that has not been understood yet. I am fully open to the fact that we can all perform mystic feats that defy our limited understanding of science. Not that such feats make anyone any more divine than another. Human nature is full of surprises and skills, many of which are new but many of which we have lost, or don’t realize that we possess. I recommend being open to the stories of miracles, magic and mysticism, while still remaining scientific. After all modern science is still discovering that there is so much that we don’t know, so much still to discover, or rediscover.
Ultimately the stories we tell our children and that we buy into, they all give our searching minds a degree of meaning. They help us to interpret our reality, the Mystery that it is, and we need magical thinking to make sense of it sometimes, as paradoxical as it may sound. So look into the stories, but look at all of them from all cultures and historical reference points, and see them as all attempting to tell the same story, the one of humanity, at different times in history and under differing conditions with varying gems of insight to share, but never let one story cause you to lose your humanity or your common connection with all humans, even if they have bought into another story based on parental demands or political necessity. Those who wield a story in order to control and dominate their peers by fear or threat, are motivated by a lust for power over them. Priests and politicians are non-different in that way today. Faith in a higher originating source, or in a preferred style of etiquette to uplift consciousness can certainly be there, and should be there as a foundation to our quest for meaning in life as well as our latent highest potentials, but when it becomes a weapon, when we use our story to justify our superiority over others, we are weaponizing religion, our adopted story, for political and selfish motives, implying ultimately that we have lost the real purport or lesson from the story in the first place. So become introspective. Is our fear of death distorting our love of life? Look at your story as well as your motivation. You may learn something new from it.
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The stories we tell ourselves, create our reality. Such an important topic to talk about and a powerful message to help us remember our part n creating our reality.
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Hey there many thanks @trucklife-family, I appreciate your positive feedback. We are writing our own story here on the Hive blockchain, and creating our ideal future as a result.
Somos un compendio de historias y vivencias que otros trasmiten, de lo que oimos y vemos , eso va formando lo que somos.
Beautifully put1
I always enjoy reading you bits of wisdom in your posts!
This one has got me looking inward to discover what stories may have influenced me.
That is why I use to like traveling to witness first hand the different cultures and this makes me take it a step further to understand their stories that their cultures were built around.
I live in Meti country with the mixed cultures. I am being exposed more and more to the stories of the indigenous peoples here which is quite different than the stories of the culture I grew up in. It's these stories that gives me some understanding and the ability to see the perspective they are coming from. Their stories are the stories of the land which I have come to call home and I appreciate the teachings that comes with them.
Thank you for sharing and getting me exploring the many stories that we have in our lives!
Forgive my late reply here, you are reminding me how valuable it is to travel, perhaps now since we are in lockdown I am thinking about it more.