Bio / FAQ

I am a storyteller. I am committed to having facility with stories, to being a master of the art of creating and enacting stories. More importantly I am committed to every human being on the planet having this mastery.

What do I mean by creating and enacting stories?:

For me everything we experience as humans is a story. We process all experience through our nervous systems, our senses, and compile it in our brains. Everything that arises to our consciousness is in the form of language.

Everything we experience has a name, a description. Even such thoughts as “I can’t even describe how I felt” or “I don’t know what happened,” are descriptions of an experience-you could say these descriptions are our stories. One of my stories is we have no access to reality, none of us has a privileged frame of reference or point of view. You line up a hundred people and ask them what just happened you will likely get 100 different stories about what just happened. Some will be quite different, some will be quite similar, a few may even be identical. You could say we bring our past experiences with us in order to interpret current experiences. So which of these hundred people had the “correct” experience, the “true” one, the real experience? I say none. All we can do is interpret experiences through our composite physical structure, which constitutes our minds. Language is how we bring experience to consciousness. For us the most important thing about an experience is what it means to us. Out of what our experiences mean come our actions. We do not act from the actual experiences. I am talking about how we respond to life, our actions over time, that which gives our life its character and us our personalities.

I do not seek agreement from you, I seek understanding from you; just understand the concept. It barely matters that you agree. In fact agree/disagree, though paramount to most of us in making sense of what other people say-myself included much of the time-once examined becomes useless. For example who cares if you agree with Darwin’s theory of natural selection? What matters is do you understand it and is it a workable description for why things are the way they are?

So in the context of this conversation, Darwin’s theory is a story. It means something about all life on this planet and if we work within its framework we will act in a certain way. Of course Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed how we experience the world. It is a powerful and elegant story. As with Newton’s theories on physical mechanics being supplanted by Einstein’s, Darwin’s theories may be supplanted by more elegant and workable theories. Newton’s ideas remain elegant and work very well as long as that which is measured is not extremely small or move at some appreciable portion of the speed of light.

I say the same applies to the character of our lives and our personalities. That which constitutes who we know ourselves to be, guides our actions and gives us our experience of life is a story, a theoretical model if you will. We created this from the meanings we gave all the experiences in our lives. It is our story. It is a compilation of millions of stories. Many times I have found evidence of a past event in conflict with what I was absolutely certain had happened the way I remembered it. But what I remembered was not the event itself. What I remembered was a story I had created about the event and as I grew older that story kept changing. As far as how I experience my life the event itself was nothing compared to what I made it mean.

Here’s the core of my conversation: given that who we are and how we experience life is a story we created for ourselves, don’t we have complete freedom over this? Don’t we have complete freedom over who we are and how we experience life? This freedom is the mastery of story telling I seek. We can create a world for ourselves in which humanity flourishes for millions of years, maybe even forever, in which we become interstellar explorers and can take care of each other.