Elie Wiesel wrote: “God made Man because He loves stories.” The ironic thing is that this statement is itself a story. We are a story telling species. You could say that story-telling is what distinguishes us from all other creatures on this planet. That is the premise of Jonathan Gottschall’s book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. From the earliest cave paintings to the New York Times bestsellers list, we tell stories about others and about ourselves.
Families tell family stories to reinforce their identity. Whenever my wife’s siblings gather together they repeat old family tales over and over again, comparing and correcting each other’s memories. My wife is the family story-keeper in our family for our kids and grandkids. When our children come over she will tell them of things that happen in their childhood and their parent’s childhood. These stories are our family heritage, and they will be told long after my wife and I are gone.
In religion we tell stories about our identity as a spiritual family: our origins, our nature, our values, and our future. Those stories have been collected into scripture and tradition about the scriptures. Religions tell stories about how to be “saved,” whether that means salvation from hell or salvation from endless cycles of reincarnation or from ignorance, illusion and delusion. These stories are repeated and reinterpreted by each generation of preachers and teachers. They form various traditions within religions.
In politics we tell stories about who we are as nation or a people or a political party. We explain how terrible our political opponents are and how righteous our side is. In time of war we go further and demonize our enemies, making them into creatures that are less than human. That makes them easier to kill. We see this happening in real time on both sides in the current Gaza war. No matter which side you take, the side we support is righteous and the other side is evil. Propaganda, disinformation and misinformation are political forms of story-telling.
The most unexamined stories are the ones we unconsciously tell ourselves about ourselves as individuals. Since the time we began to be aware of ourselves as separate creatures (sometime between the ages of two and three) we listen to the stories our parents, friends and culture people tell us about ourselves. We filter and edit these stories in our minds to craft our self-identity. That identity helps us navigate society.
If our stories are healthy, we fit in with human society. If our self-stories fail us, we end up in prison or dead or worse. Or we employ therapists and psychoanalysts to help us rewrite our stories. Religious conversion is a way of resetting our life stories. We can be “born again” as a new creature with a new story that starts at our conversion. We get to start over with a clean slate. We erase our past with all its sins, and begin anew.
If we are blessed with a spirit of self-inquiry, at some point we notice that many of the stories that we tell ourselves do not ring true to our experience, and we begin the process of deconstruction. That is what I did with my evangelical Christianity. If we go deep enough in this process we see that all stories about ourselves are false. They are fictions that we have adopted to help us navigate a confusing world.
We are not our stories. Stories are just the inventions of our minds. They are not true. With that realization we are freed from family, cultural and religious narratives that have controlled our lives from infancy. We glimpse what is deeper than story. We see our original unformed nature. The danger is that this moment of realization can easily become another story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. If that happens then the delusion becomes deeper than ever.
When I am being interviewed I am usually asked to tell the story of my spiritual journey. When I was an evangelical it was called my testimony. Now other terms are used, but it amounts to the same thing. I am never sure how to respond any more. I can describe my life from any of a dozen different perspectives, starting at a number of different points and emphasizing different aspects of my life. I have told the story of my life differently at different times in my spiritual journey. They were all true to me at the time I told them.
Now I realize that none of those stories are true. They are all just yarns that my mind weaves in order to arrange events into a pattern that other minds can make sense of. No story of spiritual awakening is true because there is no self to wake up and there never was anyone to wake up. We wake up from the story-telling self to know we are what we have always been.
So when asked for my story I usually start with a disclaimer that it is just a story, and then I proceed to tell a story. It is a useful fiction. It is fictitious because the separate self that tells the story is a fiction. A fictitious character telling its fictitious story. A fiction telling a fiction. But the story can still be useful - as good stories always are – when they are used to point beyond themselves to where stories cannot go.
But I no longer take these stories too seriously. I do not believe them, and I do not tell them to myself. When I find myself believing my own stories, I shake my head, laugh at myself and move on. To believe one’s own stories is self-deception. The alternative to telling ourselves stories about ourselves is to dwell in the selfless present. To live moment to moment in that timeless space that gives birth to all stories.
How does awakening happen? To answer that question is a story, but I will tell it anyway! Ironically it is often happens through stories. Jesus told stories that were designed to awaken people from the prison of his inherited religious tradition. Zen masters did the same thing. To use the old metaphor, a thorn is used to remove the thorn, and then the thorn is tossed away. But Christians tend to turn the thorn into a relic and build a church around it. Jesus was a spiritual revolutionary who never wrote a book. He told stories to awaken people.
Unfortunately after Jesus’ lifetime, instead of following his method, Christians who did not know what Jesus was really doing began to tell stories about Jesus. Stories that Jesus never told. Stories which the Church came to say had to be believed to be a Christian. In this way the awareness and message of the Kingdom of God was lost. Any gospels or epistles written by the followers of Jesus that did not share the orthodox story were banned. So the cycle of delusion repeated itself.
Don’t get me wrong, stories are nice. I love a good story. Stories can reach a place in our hearts deeper than stories. I am a voracious reader of fiction. I am always reading a novel, usually one or two a week, while at the same time reading two or three non-fiction books. But of course there is no such thing as a non-fiction book. There are just books that the majority of people agree are non-fiction.
I love stories, but I no longer believe them. Especially the stories we tell ourselves. When we step back from our stories we see how ridiculous some of the stories that we used to believe are. Then we have to laugh aloud at ourselves and at our religion. It is always healthy to laugh at ourselves and at our religions. It is when we take them too literally and too seriously, then we are really lost.
I am reading a novel right now entitled The Story Collector. It takes place in Ireland. One of the characters is an American student studying at Oxford University in 1911 who is doing his thesis on the folklore of Celtic peoples. In particular he is collecting stories about fairies. He published his thesis as a book also called “The Story Collector.” He ends it with these words: “If we lose our stories, we lose ourselves.” He is saying this as a warning. I read it as a promise. When we lose the stories that will tell about ourselves, then we discover who and what we really are.