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.

Storytellers, reclaim your power to shape the future through stories. You are descendants of the bards and the wonder-workers.

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

All good stories are practical guides for living, or negative guides on how not to live.

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

Stories are the highest technology of being.

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

The historian deals with the past, but the true storyteller works with the future.

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.