Fantasy, Narrative, Reality

And a message from Nora Bateson

Nora Bateson is joining Sensemaking 102! The course begins on June 11th. My London event with Josh Schrei on June 17th has just five tickets left. Want to host one of the 50+ global screenings of Leviathan this month? Let us know on this form.

She’s beautiful. Flawless, actually. Guests hang on her every word, reaching for her as she drifts by. She moves through the party like a dancer, graceful, poised. The sun is warm on her skin and the air is fresh and she wants for nothing.

Wait. Who’s that? There in the corner. He’s frowning and he has his arms crossed. He’s staring right at her. His eyes narrow as she catches his gaze across the room. An unpleasant itch starts in her throat. The sun doesn’t feel quite so warm now. She tries her winning smile, but his frown deepens. She should walk away, but can’t seem to. Is his frown… judgemental? She doesn’t like that one bit. No, she won’t stand for it.

She strides over. ‘Is there a problem?’ ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘This is a lie.’

She laughs it off but it sounds hollow in her ears. ‘I think you’re mistaken.’ He shakes his head. ‘No. The real world writhes with ecstacy and grief and madness and hope.’ He prods her shoulder with a bony finger. ‘In the real world, not everyone likes you. I can take you there. For a price…”

This piece begins with a fantasy. A mental abstraction that ignores reality to keep the ego in a false state of control and certainty. But then something disrupts the fantasy, and shatters the illusion. The moment a conflict arises, it transforms from fantasy to narrative.

Narrative is another kind of mental abstraction, but one that can help us make sense of ourselves and the world. There is a strong body of evidence from neuroscience and psychology suggesting that we process reality primarily through stories.

When people listen to the same story, their brain activity temporarily synchronises. Narrative aligns us to a shared sense of what matters. Other studies have shown that when we hear a story, we’re using the same cognitive processes we use to navigate real life. Narrative is also fundamental to our sense of unity and purpose, and our self-identity is created in part by turning our life into a coherent story.

As Joseph Campbell and Christopher Booker theorised, the reason the same kinds of narratives appear across cultures is that they are drawn from deep in our unconscious minds. When wielded well, narrative can help us embrace the complexity of life, to grasp a thread of our experience and follow it toward profound truths. Narrative echoes reality in that we never quite know where a narrative is taking us. We’re not certain our heroine is going to make it, even though we’ve experienced thousands of other stories where she triumphs.

A fantasy isn’t a story. It is a kind of avoidance, a retreat into the ego’s version of paradise. A place of ultimate control, and ultimate fulfillment. A place where nothing really changes. If the opening of this piece went on and the protagonist stayed at her perfect party, it would become insufferable and unreadable, loaded with the uncanny wrongness of something pretending to be real that isn’t.

Katy Perry never quite recovered from that trip to space.

Fantasy disconnects us from life, but modern life is dictated by fantasies. Endless progress is a fantasy. Tech-utopianism is a fantasy. Rigidly held ideological positions are fantasies.

Narratives can emerge from these fantasies, and often do. That’s why, as much as they can help us, narratives can also trap us. Our stories about ourselves can make us feel achingly sad and hopeless. Our stories about the world can blind us to the truth or lead us to ruin.

For all its power, narrative is not reality. Fantasy, narrative and reality exist in a triad. Reality is real, and encases narrative. Narrative interprets and explores reality. It deepens and reveals, or blinds and obscures. Fantasy is a void in the center, encased by both. It draws on truth, but twists it to hide from itself.

The place where narrative and reality meet is called the imaginal. As John Vervaeke points out, the imaginal is not the same as imagination. Imagine a frog: that’s imagination. But when a child dresses up as Iron Man and runs around fighting evil, they are in an imaginal space. The imaginal is embodied abstraction. It’s what allows us to bring our narratives into reality. That’s why, if our narratives are flawed, they don’t bring us where we want to go when we try to enact them.

In Leviathan, Josh Schrei explores this through the lens of activism.

“The current narrative is that we don't have any time… but if we plan our revolutions, our social systems, entirely on the notion that we don't have any time, we're not going to build anything sustainable. If the entire thing driving it is we don't have time, climate change is upon us, we don't have time, we have to figure this out now, we're infusing it with the anxious rush that is the problem with the whole system to begin with.

The problem with the progress narrative is that it's always in a rush to get somewhere else. And if our response to that is that we've run out of time, we have to topple this now, I guarantee you we're not going to build anything resembling the long-term, sustainable, organic system that we want. It takes time.”

Real change takes time because nature takes time. Tao te Ching: “nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” When we take our narrative cues from reality, and combine them with our incredible ability to imagine, we find stories of transformation.

Nora Bateson and I have been talking about this recently, and she’ll be joining Sensemaking 102 to host our closing session. Below is a letter she’s written to participants, and I wanted to share it here because I think it beautifully explores the nuances of narrative.

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A Message From Nora Bateson

I look forward to meeting with you at the end of the course. Before you begin, I wanted to invite you to play with an idea about narrative that I have been exploring for some years now. It has to do with not mistaking the map for the territory.

Stories are alive. They enter the living. Your story changes my story.

Stories are the weft of slippery threads pulling through the warp of truths and illusions, always iterating, pinging, luring the human soul into a re-telling. I have noticed that stories are never alone, they thread in clusters, from many directions to create a notion of reality that is coherent across generations, contexts, and reflected through experience.

Emotion, intellect, body, spirit, ancestral and future generations are all met in story. No aspect of the living human being is left out of these undulating rhythms… stories saturate.

For years I have wondered if perhaps the caper to find the new story is a ruse, a mirage, seducing a culture of control into yet another self- reflexive trap. What if the story is not the guiding undercurrent of culture, but rather the boat that rocks and rolls atop it?

What if the story is not the structure of the illusion, but the paint on its walls?

What if… and here is my invitation to you, what if the narratives of culture are tapestry-ing responses to those big questions in life that cannot be answered? Who am I, where did we come from, what are we here for, “What comes after death,” “What is success,” “What is it to be a good person,” “What is God?”

Those big questions through which a thousand stories have been weaving from a thousand cultures, since ever, can be seen as scaffoldings where our stories wriggle and tangle into tight epistemological knots.

These are the myths, the tales, the religions, the deep strata through which the stories of societies have threaded. Stories need gaps. Stories are true, and untrue. Stories must be told and remain untold. Stories, if they are worthwhile, change as they stay the same.

“What is love,” “What is the point of life,” “What is it to be loveable?”

These questions form the premises of the stories that flow through them in the form of bigger stories. “How do I become loveable?” This question, for example, could host hallucinations of multiple narratives. It may seem very real to someone that to be loved they must have financial wealth; to get wealth they must win at the game of capitalism; capitalism is competitive,this is projected on nature and justifies Machiavellian strategy for wealth and power.

Or the same question might hold an ethical narrative thread. Entangled with the wealth narrative I might hold that to be loved I must be a good person, to be a good person I must know that my deeds are correct, to know they are correct I must have relevance in a doctrine of ethics and morals, I must excel in spiritual development, my form of spiritual development is righter than yours.” As the two wrap each other, what could go wrong? Now, add many more contexts of narratives to this question, like politics, health, or education, and watch the complexity bloom.

The call to change the financial narrative, or the spiritual narrative, or the cultural identity of the individual narrative may be housed in another approach to narrative itself.

I have found that the questions, “Who can I be when I am with you, and Who can you be when you are with me?” invite a whole new world of story into the way we can betogether. In contrast, “Who am I? Who are you?” Or “How do I become a better person?” reconfirm the isolation of the individual, thus obscuring the ecology of the many ways we may find to be alive together. Can you feel the difference?

Narratives are not causes - they are consequences upon which so much has been built that they now appear as causal. With time, culture forests into these big questions through an ecology of stories all intertwining and interdepending upon the underlying questions. What are the new questions that will give rise to new stories? If you want new stories, don’t bother changing the old ones, as you will only end up rearranging them through the same questions.

If perchance, narratives of culture are transcontextual responses to questions, then the question I would like to offer you is this: What are the questions through which new stories will burst into being? Be careful not to instrumentalize this project again into a mechanism of finding the perfect one-size-fits-all story to implement globally.

Perhaps, instead of “changing the story”, ferment questions that entice meadows of stories, oceans of stories, families of stories that invite sacred vitality.

For now, I hope this invitation opens portals of inquiry and new meanderings of thought for you. See you soon.

With love and warmth,

Nora

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Navigating fantasy, narrative and reality will be one of many skills we’ll be developing on Sensemaking 102. We’ll be inquiring deeply into our own stories about the world, the stories we encounter, weaving and unravelling to find the truth within the tapestry. Alongside that, we’ll be untangling the topics that define the zeitgeist, through the lens of Tech, Power, Economics, Myth and Systems Change.

We begin on the 11th of June and have two scholarship places left. You can also spread the cost of the course over three months if you check out using PayPal.

Call Me Ishmael

To close this piece, I’m going to share a passage from one of my favourite books, The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker. I mentioned the book here a few months ago, and his son Nick got in touch to let me know that he and his dad used to watch Rebel Wisdom together before he passed away. It felt very special and I’m grateful to Nick for getting in touch.

Booker has been a big influence on my work. He was an accomplished journalist and was one of the founders of the satirical magazine Private Eye, which is still going strong. The Seven Basic Plots was his magnum opus which took him twenty years to complete.

A few weeks ago, when Leviathan’s editor and co-writer Whetham Allpress suggested we change the title from Crossroads, Booker’s explanation of the centrality and importance of the ‘Overcoming the Monster’ narrative in almost every story was one of the factors that led me to the change. The monsters in our stories are our own shadows, and defeating them is a symbol of integration and wholeness.

I’ve never understood this scene in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. Typical art-house nonsense from George Lucas. Just tell me what’s going on through exposition and get back to Wookies.

While writing this piece I opened The Seven Basic Plots to a random page, which happend to include a passage about Moby Dick. It is one of the quintessential stories about facing a monster, but it has a twist that resonates deeply with what we explore in Leviathan.

A book falling open on just the right page is a very lazy plot device, but this genuinely happened. Reality can be cheesier than fantasy or narrative. Or maybe the Leviathan is trying to speak.. In any case, I think Booker’s analysis gives us a fascinating lens on how analysing narrative can reveal the deep code of culture.

“When Melville completed Moby Dick, he famously wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb’. Without fully understanding how or why, he must have sensed that his imagination had become possessed by a story which tried to turn the archetypal foundations of storytelling on their heads. He had relished conceiving a tale in which the hero, Ahab, was all dark, setting out to destroy the White Whale which was a symbol of all that is light; even though the hidden logic of the tale continued to insist this could only end in his hero's destruction. Somewhere from his unconscious Melville knew he had written 'a wicked book’, a story which attempted to defy all the cosmic order of things. But at the same time he felt ‘spotless as a lamb’. He did not wish to feel any remorse, because, like other Romantic writers of the age, he had the exhilarating sense he was venturing into wholly new, uncharted waters of the human spirit, where no storytellers had ever travelled before.“

Booker goes on to compare similar stories of the age, including Frankenstein and Don Giovanni. Stories which explore the collective shadows that began to form in the 19th century as machines, and machine-thinking, began to replace the deeper relationality and connection that we all need to thrive.

“It is no accident that each of these stories was written at a time, the first part of the nineteenth century, when a highly significant change was coming over the psychology of Western man...In the dramatic advance of scientific knowledge, of which the immense material changes being brought by the industrial revolution were only the most obvious outward sign, man had begun to step out of his natural frame in a way that had no precedent. His new technological power was giving him the sense that he now had the power physically to 'conquer' nature as never before. Unprecedented advances in scientific knowledge were giving him the sense he could conquer the mysteries of the universe intellectually.

On all sides there was the exhilarating sense of stepping onto that escalator of 'progress' which was carrying the human race up out of the dark, primitive past into an ever more glorious future…in taking this further giant step out of the natural frame from which he had sprung, there was an immense unconscious price to pay, in the severing of his new, seemingly all-powerful consciousness from that deeper level of his being which linked him instinctively with nature.”

We’re all riding that escalator of progress now, nearing its inevitable top. The old narrative of progress has turned into a fantasy.

It’s time to create the conditions from which new narratives emerge, and tell them well the moment we find them. Narratives that bring us back to what we’ve lost since the Industrial Revolution, while honouring what we’ve gained.