The Story of Consciousness

sto·ry

/ˈstôrē/

noun

1. An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.

2. An account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something.

3. A widely ciruclated rumor.

4. A lie, a falsehood.

5. Legend, romance.

6. Matter, situation.

7. A set of rooms within a space between the floors of a building.

So many stories… Photo by Sindre Aalberg

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

— Maya Angelou, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"

Just like the floor of an apartment building, a narrative is insular to itself.

Once a story is created, its parts exist in perpetuity: no matter how many times you watch MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, that movie will always begin in black and white. Dorothy will alway cry when she’s captured by the witch; and inevitably her ruby slippers will take her home. Complete and encapsulated with a beginning, middle and end — a movie, TV show, or book of fiction can be flipped through and reviewed with discretion. And while the reader may be affected by the narrative insofar that the narrative is provocative; the narrative does no physical harm to the reader. Just as in a dream, the suffering is real only within the confines of the story, where it must feel real in order to be purposeful. The reader/dreamer/audience experiences whatever befalls a character through identification with them; and to this end, despair can be gulped down like cold coffee, passions tasted like a ripe strawberry, and victory sipped like champagne.

“It’s not real, it’s only a story.”

— Sebastian, The Neverending Story

At its root, story telling is an exploration of consequences. When we go to the theater to see a “play,” we watch the actions and reactions of the story play out on a stage from a comfortable vantage point. From our seat in the audience we can view “mistakes” as narrative forks in the road, without which the story would be boring. When characters make choices, whether they are “right” or “wrong,” what follows are the dominoes of inevitability. The hero or the villain mounts his horse in a reactionary effort, and across this battlefield of changing fortunes various players are poised to act in their own best interests — each with a different perspective about what serves their needs. Along the way, more dominoes await the “right” mistakes to nudge them into motion.

Story Arc Diagram by Illuminara,

What better tool than the arc of a narrative to form opinions and catalyze growth? When we have a complete narrative arc, we can examine mistakes and know that if only another choice had been made, everything would have turned out differently. The arc is effective because it imitates the storyline of our own lives — our lives being complete with beginnings, middles, and ends…

Some of the most satisfying stories are the ones where favorable outcomes are found even though the worst mistakes have been made. This idea that we can put the pieces back together, or rearrange them to make something new and better out of the thing we have broken, pleases the mind because all to often this does not happen in real life. The primary lesson of the manifest world is that you cannot put the cat back in the bag. When the “milk is spilt” or the “dye is cast,” what’s done is done; so it’s understandable that we would generate fantasies in reaction to what cannot be undone.

And yet, whether rooted in fact or fiction, really any happenings of magnitude — whether horrible or wonderful, are candidates for canonization for the sheer interest they generate. Afterall, a story is purposeful so long as it hooks curiosity and enthralls the listener. The word “convey” comes to mind here, with all definitions ringing appropriate… to communicate, to deliver, to move… which gets pretty mind-bendy when you consider that all deliveries themselves must be moved in order to be delivered.

So we arrive at the existential purpose of a story: a means by which we move ourselves.

Now let’s go behind the curtain for a moment and look at the phenomena of writing fiction, and imagine someone like Tolkien or Martin of Rowling, alone in their study dreaming up worlds and pounding away at the keys. As a storyteller, a spinner of narrative, one is tasked with becoming many. In order to create the identities of the heroes, the villains, and everyone in between, a storyteller must embody these characters. Fracturing themselves into the witch, the dragon, the princess, the boy, the crone, the king, the scholar, the barbarian — a storyteller fleshes these archetypes with substance and point of view. In another sense, a storyteller avails themselves as a sort of portal from which these characters can emerge. And once completed, a good narrative can reveal the interwoven threads of these characters’ perspectives playing against each other across time.

And this is where I get all mystical and misty-eyed:

Storytelling is yet another beautiful example of the polar relationship between nothing and everything, and revealing the holographic nature by which the divine cloaks itself in the form of many for its own entertainment, curiosity, edification, and satisfaction. As Anne Lamont describes in her book Bird By Bird, “some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.”

And whether or not we are storytellers ourselves, or simply consumers of content — we each live within the story of our own lives. Simultaneously, we also live within the story of human beings, the story of the earth, the story of the solar system, the story of our galaxy… the story of the universe exhaling. And we go on gossiping and making up stories within the stories of our lives to pass the time. And again my wheels start turning and I find myself wondering like the rest of you, what is the point?

The pattern of this behavior is the point. As consciousness continually replicates infinite points of view within itself, stories are the trees that bear the fruits of perspective and awareness. Consciousness cannot help but be what it is, create what it is — just as you cannot help but be who you are, and I cannot help but be me. The point of the story, is the story. Your story, my story, every story — real or imagined, from the mythical to mundane, forms the bedrock of experience. And as long as curiosity is hungry to roam the valleys of emotions and vistas of experience, the intangible form of the story will retain its value, its firmament. For whether inside our dreaming minds or the lives we are living, we are bound in perpetuity to exist within the state of a story.

Mechanically speaking, the existence of stories demonstrates the means by which the manifest world reciprocates the unmanifest, and precipitates more consciousness.

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P.S. Here’s an interesting tidbit from Vonnegut on the shapes of stories. Notice the waveform! It’s all about the ups and downs, baby!

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Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the 'simple shapes of stories.'

The Ripples of Inevitability and Consequence

Today I would like to speak to another aspect of evidence within our universe of the holographic nature of things: cause and effect. The dance of the physical across the expanse of time. Most people do not think of physics as a manifestation of consciousness, but to me the two are integral to each other. At the end of the day, nothing can be truly be separated from anything else. We see small morsels of the whole here and there and think they are their own things; but really they are but bits of the pattern that consistently and seamlessly generates reality and our experience with it. The nerds of Silicon Valley are not far off in suggesting that all of this is a “computer program,” but don’t take the metaphor on its semantical value alone. Words are temporary things, arrows pointing to a distance horizon. The trick is to see the big picture beyond the words.

Cause and effect — an idea so basic we take it for granted. You strike a pool ball cross the table, and depending on your speed and angle, you may or may not sink it in a pocket. Every time we take to the city streets in our automobiles we encounter the stop and go rhythm of cause and effect affecting our commute through the virtues of a traffic jam or a chance fender bender. Run a red light, and watch your insurance increase. Tip over a cup coffee and a hot mess spills across the table. Drop a glass and it shatters. This fundamental aspect of physical existence that is cause and effect provides consciousness with a never-ending scientific inquest of trial and error for the simple fact that it endlessly generates data — “What happens if…?”

Now, let’s extend beyond inanimate objects colliding in space/time to breach the cause and effect of actions and words from sentient beings. Some would call this karma, but I’m all about the ideas beyond the words so let’s set that word aside for now. If termites gnaw at the fibers of your house for long enough it will fall down. Kill all the wolves in a given region and watch everything about that ecosystem change. Whether it is the polar dance of predator and prey, or subtle social, cultural, emotional encounters between humans: experiences and communications within and between species have lasting impacts not just on the world around us, but within us — informing our attitudes, beliefs, and subsequent actions. Why does anybody do anything? Because of whatever happened previously. Each moment is a pearl giving birth to the next pearl on the strand, the next ring on the tree, as consciousness skips from one morsel of spacetime to the next gathering data on its sojourn through the cosmos of itself.

“...time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”

— Richard Powers, "The Overstory"

Everything happens in sequence, and sequence is integral to existence. Pay attention and you’ll find it’s quite fascinating to watch yourself slide through the monads of moment to moment existence. Of course, there are predictable rhythms to any given day — thumping along in an ebb and flow, pulling you to do, urging you to say. Like the moment you wake up and get moving, for instance. Or your first meal of the day, where the chewing is followed by swallowing and what’s started is inevitably finished. And then there’s the getting dressed, that transformation from naked to clothed. And of course, the inevitable conversations you have with people you encounter, conversations often built on previous encounters, in themselves their own microcosms of consequence…. X followed by Y followed by Z… all of it adding up to relationships and understandings, feeding and furthering your awareness, your future actions; beginnings and endings, conflicts and retreats.

Have you ever said something you knew in advance that you didn’t want to say? Only have it drawn out of you as you watch in horror as its impact ripples over the other person and bounces back to into your chest like a Volkswagen of regret? Success and regret have been my most powerful teachers, and beholden to cause and effect the same way everything is. But it could not be otherwise because this is how consciousness grows/explores/expands. We need to get the feedback from a source outside ourselves. Everything in nature is looking for this kind of contact. Butting heads is just another exercise in polarity.

We have moments of conflict, and we have moments of serendipitous success; and both serve the purpose of experience — and anyone who’s every been very lucky or unlucky will tell you that it was all a matter of the right things or the wrongs things lining up in sequence to create a perfect storm of fortune. You know what else is a serendipitous sequence of inevitabilities?

The waveform of movement is always, essentially, circular. This may seem overly obvious until you realize (and I mean, really realize) that circles (as well as spherical, cylindrical and toroidal shapes) are literally everywhere — wheels, pullys, the sun, the planet, the shape of flowers, fruits, the trunks of trees, the stems of flowers, seeds, and stones worn smooth by the constant movement of water across their surface…. fuck, twist your hair into a bun and what have you got? A sphere made out of a spiral. I ask myself, why this shape? Why are circles so integral to everything?

Why is the best way to mix something to stir it???

Circles are conducive to movement because they are a product of movement, just as our entire solar system is a product of movement. Planets formed into spheres because they were/are in a constant state of motion.

Just like our universe.

I’m saying these things because we get caught up sometimes in the relative illusion that life is static. That our lives are “going nowhere,” and that “time is an illusion.” Time is not an illusion. Not only is time integral to physical reality, it’s also a medium for the growth of consciousness. There can be no understanding without time, because time allows the space for things to happen and consequences to play out, which paves the way for consciousness to reflect and draw its own conclusions.

“Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

— Star Wars

In many respects, its more accurate to think of time as distance travelled. And I’m not just referring to the relative time/distance you travel to the work each day — I’m talking about the movement of the whole; that’s what time is. This movement of the whole of the universe is what makes everything possible, because everything is playing out in sequence, across the span of space time. The history of what came before this moment. The unknowing of what’s coming next, and the curiosity that propels consciousness to experiment, take action, discover and slip into the next inevitable empty moment.

Curious consciousness witnesses experiences. Consequences are a function of cause and effect. Movement is a function of polarity.