Saved by Prashanth Narayan and
"The Danger of a Single Story"
It is a great mystery that though the human heart longs for Truth in which alone it finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to Truth is one of hostility and fear. So the Spiritual Teachers of humanity, like Buddha and Jesus, created a device to circumvent the opposition of their listeners: the story. They knew that the most
... See moreAnthony De Mello • Taking Flight: A Book of Story Meditations
From this point on, the core dynamics of the Subject Story were largely set: protection, division, subjugation, conquest, patronage, duty; in a word, paternalism. We can recognise them from the Roman Empire to the British to the rise of Hitler, right through to the looming resurgence of the Subject Story in the form of the strongman leaders of the
... See moreJon Alexander • Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us
My intention is not to convince you which stories are good and which are bad. Rather, I want to show that when one story dominates, it risks exterminating others or doesn’t do justice to the reality it presumes to narrate. Storytelling, like ecosystems, needs diversity to thrive. And since stories have a direct impact on reality — to the point that
... See moreNiels Devisscher • Belonging and Butterflies in Times of Breakdown
We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and to hear silence, to name them, and the
... See moreA story exists in language, but lives in the imagination, in the memory. When does a story live? It lives only when it is read or heard. A story is part telling, part hearing. Part writing, part reading. It dwells in the ambiguous place between the teller and the hearer, between the writer and the reader. The greatest storytellers understand this m
... See moreBen Okri • The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling
‘You cannot take away someones story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however discredited and outdated it may be. Change happens only when you replace it with another. When we develop the right story and learn how to tell it, it will infect the minds of people across the political spectrum. Those who te
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