The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling

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.

Stories are the highest technology of being.

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.

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

A nation is shaped by the stories its children are told. A nation is sustained by the stories it tells itself. The good stories can liberate its potential, or help it face the dragons of its evils.

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.

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

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?