Here is the next part of my book, chapter 1, I guess you could call it. I’m not sure how long I will go on posting what I write for my book here. If nothing else, this couls serve as a nice repository for rough drafts. When it’s all finished though, I do plan on making sure that it’s fully available online for free, because keeping knowledge flowing freely is what the book is all about. Posting it online free is what “feels right” for me, although I know other people have other opinions on that. I do want to make sure I do it in the way which will best meet my needs, as the better it gets, the more I think I could really sell this someplace. But, I don’t see why those two drives need to be mutually exclusive. So I’ll probably continue as now until I find a reason to do otherwise.

Comments, as always, are most welcome. Especially on this topic outlined above, but also of course on the actual chapter itself.

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Stories contain encoded truths about human experience. Storytelling, in its various forms is one of the oldest, most consistently important of all human activities. We spend almost our entire lives immersed in them in one form or another. We project ourselves into stories - and imagine them happening to us - for pleasure, and also to learn about ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea of there being some kind of intrinsic truth in stories has been given a black eye by religion and ideology. Strict adherence to one of these systems most commonly leads people to believe they and their stories are “right” and everyone else is “wrong.” Less tolerant and open-ended religions and ideologies would have us ignore entire traditions of thought and systems of stories which do not match neatly to their own.

But since stories largely arise out of language, I find it much more useful to look at story-systems, religions and ideologies in much the same way as one would look at languages. Each language has attributes which make it unique and valuable. Each has its own grammar, vocabulary; concepts, assumptions and poetry. And while there’s no such thing as a “false” language, there’s no such thing as a false story.

Certainly stories can be used to lie and to mislead, and we see this regularly. But by the same token, stories need not contain “facts” in order to point toward the truth. To the rational or scientific mind, this sounds like a bit of a paradox at best, or complete nonsense at worst. The reason for all this is that science itself is essentially a religion in which the rational mind has been deified. Complete with priests, prophets, sacred texts and rituals, science even attempts to answer the “big questions” of human experience and meaning for us. The reason for its success as a story-system is that it has been so successful as a model of prediction, and such a powerful tool for innovation, and some would say progress.

Rational thinking alone though, like any religion or ideology which is strictly followed tends to denigrate competing story-systems which do not wholly agree. We see this bias crop up again and again in the language used to describe certain types of stories. We might use words like, “myth,” “legend” or “fable” disparagingly to describe things which never happened, or stories which were once important parts of religion. Even the word “fiction” is sometimes used in a negative way. “Fantasy” or “dreams” are stories which are unreal or impossible from a scientific standpoint. Similarly, we might label someone who regularly engages in such flights of fancy as a “daydreamer” or “escapist,” meaning that they retreat away from what is pragmatically real, and consequently useful.

Interestingly, science itself has made some interesting discoveries into the nature and value of escapism. Using monkey and human subjects, scientists have discovered an extremely close neurological connection between performing an action, imitating an action, and perceiving an action. The brain pathways which are illuminated in each case are the same, though the strength of the activity is gradually lessened as you move from performance to imitation to perception.

The implications of this research for the study of stories is immense. It means that when we hear a story, or act out a story in a ritual, we are engaging exactly the same functions of the mind as though we were really experiencing it ourselves. Rather than escaping from reality with stories, as is commonly held, we are expanding ourselves with new and valuable experiences. Through such exercise in the realm of stories, we grow stronger emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, just as we do when we accumulate experience in the real world. We enter into what is called a participation mystique with the story. We actually somehow become the characters, and experience their emotions as they move through events in their story.

Psychologists use the term sympathetic identification to explain this process whereby a viewer or listener comes to identify with, or temporarily assume the role of a character. In more common usage, you’ll hear people talk about “living vicariously” through someone else’s experiences. This is probably the tool used by dramatists to involve audience members emotionally with a story. The audience member comes to have an emotional stake in the outcome of the story, since they themselves have become a participant in it, on some level. Closely related to this is the Jungian idea of projection. We understand the outer world according to our inner world; we frame what we don’t know by what we do know. Like a projectionist with a movie screen, we project our own life story onto the other stories, events and people we encounter. This is an important aspect of why people are so interested in things like astrology, tarot and other divination systems. They are designed to be particularly receptive psychological screens for us to project our own interior contents on. In so doing, we come to see the themes and relationships highlighted in new ways and by connections we might not have made ourselves. Any story-system, not just astrology, can function like this.

Some of the most compelling accounts of mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, describe sufferers as losing track of the extremely fluid borders joining inner and outer world. It’s as though they become lost in the participation mystique. Every thing, every story is suddenly speaking to them personally and overwhelmingly. Ironically, the same faculties which give us our natural and intrinsic union with stories also becomes the greatest danger. But even here, at the point of being utterly overwhelmed by them, stories do point a way back home. Not coincidentally, accounts of various mental illness match very closely to depictions of mystical experience throughout history. Some people even talk about mystics as schizophrenics who healed themselves. They were able to enter fully into this other realm, but rather than becoming totally lost, they managed to return to the ordinary world. And with them, they brought powerful new experiences and insight.

Ordinarily, people never penetrate to these levels, but everyone everywhere takes part - knowingly or unknowingly - in the processes of identification and projection. They are both useful and natural, but taken to great extremes, they can obviously cause trouble. One of the main drives of the Jungian process of individuation is the gradual withdrawal of projection, so that we can see things and ourselves as they really are. Perhaps we never really leave it all behind though; we just come to understand the boundaries of us and “not us” better.

Empathy, or the ability to “walk in someone else’s shoes” is one of the fundamental aspects of what makes us human, after all. The so-called Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you,” exists at the heart of morality systems the world over. We all take part in each other’s stories. What we see happen to someone else, happens to us too on both a neurological and perhaps mystical level. And it’s this shared participation that makes stories so powerful and lasting through all times and cultures