The Power of Story

Many of you will remember the entertainer Max Bygraves, whose catch-phrase was, "I wanna tell you a story". It seems a trivial enough remark, a friendly way of starting a conversation. But if, instead, he had said, "I want to continue the great and essential task of directing consciousness and its evolution through form", you might be inclined to fall off your chair with surprise or scratch your head in puzzlement. Yet that is a perfectly legitimate way of translating his remark, because there is nothing trivial about stories, no matter how simple or oft-repeated they may be. Stories are indeed tools for directing consciousness, and they are far more widespread than the ordinary understanding of the term. In fact, we could say that absolutely anything one human being tells another is a story – and the telling can be in spoken or written words, in pictures, in mathematical symbols, or in any other form we can invent. The essence of a story is a telling, a communication, from one consciousness to another; and this telling conveys something about the way in which energies and forces are, or could be, moving. And this definition gives us quite a simple way of telling how significant a story is – for we can say that, the more general the pattern of energies and forces described, the more significant the story. This way of understanding the significance of a story is important, for it helps us to see that some kinds of stories that are supposedly simple, and fit "only for children", can in fact be more significant than other, more complicated stories for adults. As an example, it is common for stories for the very young to have a moral – in other words, to teach something about the importance of right relations, to show how energies and forces can move in better ways. Yet when we examine much of popular literature and movies, we might struggle to detect any moral message whatsoever. Is this because adults do not need to be reminded of the importance of morality? Well, perhaps in a society that perfectly embodied good will and right relations that might be true – but it hardly needs saying that we're not yet there. Maybe some adults believe that because they are more intelligent than children, and also more experienced, they do not need to hear moral messages repeated. But the point of a moral is not how well it is remembered, but how well it is incorporated into one's life – and a certain amount of repetition of a moral helps to reinforce its importance. This repetition could be likened to the "still small voice" of the soul, which never fails to remind us what we ought to do.

In fact, the moral points that some children's stories make can be surprisingly deep and subtle. Take two examples by the children's author, Julia Donaldson. The first is called, A Squash and a Squeeze. In this tale, a "little old lady" complains to a "wise old man" that her small house is too cramped. His advice? To take into the house, first her hen, then her goat, then her pig, and then her cow. As you can imagine, chaos ensues. The little old lady turns in desperation to the wise old man for his final piece of advice, which is simply to "take them all out". The result? She finally realises that her house was big enough all along. In other words, the moral is, "Learn to be satisfied with what you have." (Julia Donaldson is not so obvious as to say this.) A simple moral to state, true enough. But oh how difficult to live by! The second story is The Gruffalo. In this, a mouse takes a stroll in the "deep, dark wood", and encounters, one after another, three creatures that would happily make a meal of him – a fox, an owl and a snake. Each invites him to their house. But the mouse counters by saying he has been invited to a meal with a Gruffalo, a creature that none of the others has heard of, but which the mouse describes in terrifying detail. He concludes each of these descriptions by noting that he is meeting the Gruffalo nearby, and the Gruffalo's favourite food includes them as the main ingredient. Naturally, the mouse's foes all turn tail and flee at this news, and the mouse marvels at their gullibility in believing in this invented monster – only to walk right into a real Gruffalo, who happily informs him that mouse is his favourite food! But the mouse cleverly rescues the situation by telling the Gruffalo that "everyone is afraid of me", and offers to prove it. The Gruffalo laughingly accepts the challenge. Now the mouse retraces his steps, and re-encounters the snake, the owl and the fox. Of course, each time, as the mouse greets them, they see behind him the terrifying Gruffalo, and flee for their lives. Finally, the mouse turns to the Gruffalo and says, "But now my tummy's beginning to rumble. My favourite food is – gruffalo crumble!" The Gruffalo flees, leaving the mouse safe at last.

Before thinking about the moral, or morals of this story, it's worth noting how intricately it is

constructed. We have a story in which the main protagonist is himself a story-teller who uses the power of story, the power of framing others’ hopes and fears, to preserve his own life. He does this by telling two interlocking stories that convince his foes to leave him alone. And this story is for a three year old! But what of the moral? Well, from the point of view of the hero of the story, a simple moral one could extract is that "Intelligence can defeat brawn"; or if we want to put it in esoteric jargon, "A wellcoordinated mental body is usually of more value than a powerful physical body". But it is actually the moral that can be gleaned from the point of view of the mouse’s foes that may be more instructive. In simple terms, this could be phrased, "Don't believe everything you hear". It can be reworded thus: "Be careful who you allow to create your own hopes and fears, as they will usually have their own agenda." In this form, we can immediately see the relevance to everyday life, and in particular, to the enormous story-creating power of the media. It is the media who tell us what is important and what is not, who is famous and for what reason, and which countries are doing things we should pay attention to. Naturally, since the editors and writers, and even the owners, are only human, we can presume that they are not entirely neutral, that they do in fact have an agenda. And the general political alignment of most papers and news programmes is fairly well known – to the extent, for example, that we would not expect a person to carry in their bag copies of both the Morning Star & the Daily Telegraph. Which is not to say that attempting to see both sides of an issue is not a good thing – the disciple, after all, is asked to find the middle way, and how can one know where the middle lies unless one has some idea of the extremes?

But perhaps more insidious than any detectable bias in media coverage, a bias one can take into account, is the deliberate refusal to cover certain stories that may in fact be significant. For example, it is noticeable that in the current campaigning for the US presidency, there are candidates in both parties whose positions have been more or less ignored in the mainstream media, although they have been reported more fully on the Internet. Without going into this in detail, it serves as an example of the point that Noam Chomsky makes when he suggests that "The most effective device [of thought control developed in democratic societies] is the bounding of the thinkable, achieved by tolerating debate, even encouraging it, though only within proper limits" (Necessary Illusions, 1989). This means that anything outside these "proper limits" is both ignored by the media, and is also liable to be drowned out by the supposedly "legitimate" debate that the media promotes. And it hardly needs pointing out that the mainstream media is somewhat averse to publishing stories that concern humanity’s spiritual nature and destiny. We could therefore suggest that the mainstream media limits the range of both human hopes and human fears; and we know that it is the task of the new group of world servers to expand the range of the thinkable, by the "impression and expression of certain great ideas". The resistance of the mainstream media to reporting ideas of this type in particular has been noted before, if vaguely, in the thought that news programmes rarely tell good news. And there are a few initiatives that actively attempt to redress this balance: for example, the free newspaper, Positive News, the Italian Good News agency, and of course, World Goodwill, all strive to show the working out of these great conditioning ideas in ideals and actions.

Another question that is worth considering is the relationship between stories and truth. But before we do so, can we take a minute or two of silence, and then say together the Gayatri, followed by one OM.

O Thou Who givest sustenance to the Universe
From Whom all things proceed
To Whom all things return,
Unveil to us the face of the true Spiritual Sun
Hidden by a disc of golden Light
That we may know the Truth
And do our whole duty
As we journey to Thy sacred feet.

OM

What is Truth? Is Truth, after all, what we are ultimately looking for in a story? Perhaps we can start by recognising that, while the physical truth of a story is important – particularly in law courts and scientific experiments – it may be less interesting than the psychological truth. If physical truth tells us what happened, psychological truth tells us why. So for example, in The Gruffalo, it was not what the mouse was like that motivated his foes, but what he was able to make them believe. What we believe may become our truth, and mere facts can often be distorted or ignored to fit this picture. To sum up this phenomenon, the American comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term ‘truthiness’, which he defines thus: "Truthiness is what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support."

If it is the case that truth can become disconnected from reality in this way, then it is clearly important to find ways to re-connect it: otherwise, people will become prey to charlatans and demagogues. The opposite of an unthinking credulity is a determined scepticism, that questions everything. The scientific method is in essence a formalisation of this scepticism, that only accepts evidence when it has been tested and re-tested by different groups of investigators. However, it is as yet still confined to the dense physical plane – its stories are about the fundamental properties of physical matter. But when we begin to look for the emotional truth of a story, we would not be inclined to turn to science, but instead to art, in its many different forms. Perhaps we could say that for a story to embody a deep emotional truth, the emotional body of both the teller and the audience needs to be stilled, to reflect the deep workings of the imagination and the purity of the buddhic plane. Such deep emotional truths are no doubt related to the morals mentioned earlier.

And what about mental truth? Do we have any clear concept of what this is? Philosophers strive after it, yet disagreement and factionalism still dog their efforts. Mathematicians and scientific theoreticians may seek to capture it in symbols – but can they distinguish between a set of equations that describes something that actually exists, and another set that is internally consistent – like any other story – but is actually a mathematical fantasy? One way is to see whether the maths does in fact describe a physical phenomenon; and there have been some notable successes recently, such as chaos theory and fractals. But what happens when advanced mathematics is used to describe a physical theory that cannot be tested yet, such as string theory? Then there is surely the danger that mathematicians will be engaged in telling each other interesting stories, but not actually serving truth. We might also guess that mathematical formulations of truth are the outer or form side of mental truths, and that to grasp the inner side, one must raise one’s consciousness to a plane beyond that on which they are generated. Turning briefly from the stories that are told to us by others, we might reflect on the stories that we tell ourselves. In effect, although we may not do this consciously, we are all engaged in narrating the story of our own lives: and in doing so, we create the central hero, our self. We continually reinforce this identity by reminding ourselves what we like, who we know and used to know, and so on. Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian who allegedly instructed Carlos Castaneda, told him that it was very important to be able to stop this internal dialogue. Whatever one may think of Castaneda and the truth of his teachings – and there exists some evidence to suggest that the figure of Don Juan himself is a fiction – the notion that we should find ways to stop reinforcing the sense of a separated personal self has a ring of truth about it. And we are not only inclined to tell ourselves stories about our self, but also about others. Try sitting opposite a richly dressed businessman and a punk rocker on the Tube, and not making up some thoughts about them that conform to the stereotypes they supposedly embody. These stereotypes are prejudices, which are basically pre-fabricated stories – yet we have no way of knowing whether there is any truth in them until we see how the businessman and the punk rocker act. Which of them, for example, will give up their seat for a pregnant woman?

The idea of telling and re-telling the same story about people until it becomes a prejudice also leads to consideration of the power of Retelling. If you tell the same story over and over again out loud, you become alive to the many different ways of inflecting the words, which makes you aware of the tremendous skill that actors must employ; and of the fact that written words are very much "open to interpretation", in the same way a musical score is, so that meaning can be revealed or concealed simply in the way a story is intoned. In fact, written words are an encoded pattern for the transmission of energy through sound; and punctuation is also part of the encoding, as are marks of emphasis such as underlining, bold and italics.

Another important element of revealing or concealing meaning is found in the cadences and rhythm of the spoken word. This can be reinforced by rhyme, and also by meter, namely, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Nowadays, of course, most poetry eschews rhyme, and a regular meter is also not regarded as essential. But we should not forget that the greatest writer in English, Shakespeare, wrote his plays metrically, in blank verse. Blank verse has the basic pattern de-dum de-dum de-dum dedum de-dum; and of course, if you apply it literally, and recite it mechanically, it can actually conceal meaning, as the insistent rhythm takes attention away from the words: e.g. The qua-li-ty of mer-cy is not strained. The skill, in both the writer, and in the actor who intones the words, is to make the rhythm actually propel the meaning, so that the effect is less artificial, and more like a kind of heightened speech. And Shakespeare employed all sorts of minor variations on the basic pattern to help make this happen. For example, the opening of his most famous soliloquy breaks the pattern after the third "dedum": "To be or not to be, that is the quest-ion,". Again, we find that children’s stories are more likely to employ rhyme and meter to help intensify their effects. And when we listen carefully to prayers and mantrams, there are often metrical patterns that help to reinforce meaning. If we were able to observe on the inner planes, we would presumably detect subtler effects too.

Returning to the idea of the power of re-telling, we could say that our culture and civilisation is entirely made up of re-tellings. For example, religions, in which there is considerable emphasis on telling and re-telling their sacred stories, the scriptures – as an aside, maybe one of the reasons there is such apathy, or even antipathy, towards religions just now, relates to the point raised earlier about adults rejecting the need to hear moral messages repeated. Scientists are constantly telling and re-telling the scientific world-view through their theories and experiments. Artists do the same through their artworks. Political parties tell stories about how good they are, or would be, at running the country. And over time, re-tellings become re-interpreted: new meanings are unveiled, and so society changes. But if the rest of society moves on, and one group insists on holding on to the previous telling or interpretation, then fundamentalism, with all its attendant dangers, is born.

At this time of year, there is one story above all others that occupies our minds, the story of the birth of Jesus. The power of this story is again not based on its historical accuracy, but on its mythological symbolism, as detailed in From Bethlehem to Calvary. All of the great myths contain figures who somehow constellate powerful currents in consciousness, revealing deep spiritual meanings to those who have "ears to hear". Hercules is another such figure, and in his twelve Labours, and the five Initiations of the Christ, we see in outline the major events in the story of every disciple. Each story may differ in detail, but these events must be undergone by all. And this means not just individuals, but groups, nations, and ultimately all of humanity. In our meditation today, we can help in the unfolding of this great story by envisoning together the next chapter, the next step that humanity must take in revealing its true identity. The seed thought is, "Lost am I in light supernal, yet on that light I turn my back." [-]

Dominic Dibble

Festival of Capricorn
– London –
December 2007

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