There is nothing that expresses the roundedness of human beings more than storytelling. Stories are the highest technology of being.
There is in story the greatest psychology of existence, of living. Indeed there is in story something semi-divine. The nature of story itself is linked to the core of creation. Story belongs to the micro-moment after the big bang. It belongs to the micro-moment after the “let there be light!” act of creation.
We live in a time in which we are being told that the main things of value are the things of science and the things of technology. Our lives are being compressed into this technological reality. But it is worth remembering the many-sidedness of being human. Great evil befalls us when we restrict ourselves to just one side of our being.
It is important that we don’t become machines, that we don’t become computers. We contain machines. We contain computers. We contain all of nature, the seas, the mountains, the constellations, and the nearly infinite spaces.
At the heart of all science – its experiments, its theories, its mathematics, its discoveries, its interpretations – is the story instinct. The scientific mind would be impossible without the story DNA, without the story-seeing brain cells. The mind’s aspects do not operate in isolation. Every human being immersed in the cyclorama of reality is implicated in the cosmic story-making nature of reality. Maybe this story-making quality of reality is what constitutes the heart of our existence.
At every moment we are in a micro or macro “once upon a time” sea of existence. In every moment we are part of the infinite stories that the universe is telling us, and that we are telling the universe.
Maybe this story-making quality of being is the principal magic as well as the principal illusion of our lives. Maybe what the Buddha is indicating through meditation is transcending this story-making quality of the mind and arriving at the absolute reality that lies behind all things. When this is glimpsed, it is called Nirvana. From this perspective, the storytelling quality of being is temporal. It is a necessary illusion, but the final one which we must transcend.
But then maybe this storytelling quality of mind is itself a paradox and a metaphor of that which we are finally meant to discover. The kiss that awakens the princess from her bed of sleep is not just the kiss of romance but maybe also the kiss of enlightenment. A true awakening is an enlightenment. This is especially so when you consider sleep as the metaphor of our unawakened condition in the true wonder of reality.
Stories are the koans that life sends us. They contain hints of multiple realities.
The great stories, which appear all over the world in different variations, are intuitions sensed about this mysterious nature of the absolute reality. Great stories have lightness and multi-dimensional agility. They speak constantly to different levels in us. They speak to us at the level that we are on.
The story about the seven dwarves can be a coded reference to class conditions in society. It could also be the imagination’s grasp of fundamental patterns at work in the cellular dimension of our bodies. It could be a metaphysical understanding of the mystery of numbers. The story is never really just about seven dwarves, or it would not linger in the imagination.
We treat stories like dustbins into which we dispose our lowest sense of possibilities. The tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes is alluded to whenever we talk about something that is less than it appears to be. That same story can be just as much about the power of true seeing. In a world of advertisements, obsession with fame, in which the hyped is more valued than the true, the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes gains significant resonance. Most of what we pursue, what we are obsessed with, what confuses and humiliates us, most of what society projects at us, the inflated notions of success, are all Emperor’s New Clothes. We have bought into the way of seeing that believes all the illusions are actually the velvet royal cloak, richly to be desired. We need to be that little boy who can see most of the stuff of society as exactly what it is – mass projection and emptiness.
One story read the right way can turn our false world upside down and restore to us a true sense of sanity. For the world drives us mad with its foolishness. It has been doing this for centuries. We have slowly become aware of it and have distilled our awareness. We have planted that distillation in the most memorable and indestructible place we can find. We have made that place a constant guide to ourselves in our endless incarnations. The place in which we plant them are stories.
Stories are the infinite seeds that we have brought with us through the millennia of walking the dust of the earth. They are our celestial pods. They are our alchemical cauldrons. If we listen to them right, if we read them deeply, they will guide us through the confusion of our lives, and the diffusion of our times.
Stories are never what they seem. They are whispers from beyond the invisible screen of existence. They are whisperings from the gods we carry within us.
© Ben Okri 2015. From The Mystery Feast, Thoughts on Storytelling, Clairview Books
