The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling

The difficulties human beings face, the enigmas of life, will not go away. They will not go away till we are perfected. And we are not going to be perfected for a very long time.

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.

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

There is a presumption in thinking that we entirely invent our stories. Rather it could be said that the stories come through us, assemble themselves out of the elements of our lives and imagination. We receive and shape them. We cannot be said to originate them. All true storytellers are modest.

The true danger of stories is that they tend to bypass reason. They can bypass intelligence and go straight to the subconscious. Why else have very intelligent people in the past believed such absurd things about other races?

Stories have also been used for evil. They have been used for the denigration, the demonisation, and the extermination of peoples.

they come from beyond, from some uncommon living, ever-evolving, universal storehouse of wisdom.

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.

Imagination dreams that which knowledge makes real. It could be said that imagination is the proto-reality.