power of stories and metaphor

Metaphor: understanding one thing in terms of another.

A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.

Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.

Finding facts wasn’t always so easy. Until recently, much of the world’s data and information was piled on the dusty shelves of physical libraries. And the rest of was housed in proprietary databases that only deep pocketed institutions could afford and well-trained experts could access. But today facts are ubiquitous, nearly free, and available at the speed of light. If you want to find any factoid, you can type a few words into Google, hit RETURN, and look at what appears on the screen a few seconds later. What’s unsurprising today would have seemed preposterous just fifteen years ago: an English-speaking thirteen-year-old in Zaire who’s connected to the Internet can find the current temperature in Brussels or the closing price of IBM stock or the name of Winston Churchill’s second finance minister as quickly and easily as the head librarian at Cambridge University. That’s glorious. But it has enormous consequences for how we work and live, When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable, “What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.

And that is the essence of the aptitude of Story—context enriched by emotion.

Story exists where high concept and high touch intersect. Story is high concept because it sharpens our understanding of one thing by showing it in the context of something else. Story is high touch because stories almost always pack an emotional punch.

In his book Things That Make Us Smart, Don Norman crisply summarizes Story’s high-concept and high-touch essence:

Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the emotions…Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion.

As more people lead lives of abundance, we’ll have a greater opportunity to pursue lives of meaning. And stories—the ones we tell about ourselves, the ones we tell to ourselves—are often the vehicles we use in that pursuit.

- Daniel Pink

the hero's journey

The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.

The first stage is leaving where you are, whatever the environment. You may leave because the environment is too repressive and you are consciously uneasy and eager to leave. Or it may be that a call to adventure, an alluring temptation, comes and draws you out. In European myths this call is frequently represented by some animal stag or boar manages to elude a hunter and brings him into a part of the forest that he doesn’t recognize. And he doesn’t know where he is, how to get out, or where he should go. And then the adventure begins.

Another obvious case of the call to adventure occurs when something someone been taken away and you then go in quest of it into the realms of adventure. Always, the realm of adventure is one of unknown forces and unknown powers.

On the other hand, there may come what I call a refusal of the call, where the summons is heard or felt, and perhaps even heeded, but for one reason or another cut off. One thinks of some reason for not going, or one has fear or something like this and one remains; the results are then radically different from those of the one following the call.

- Joseph Campbell

the need for narrative

Reality TV has been moving towards greater unreality. The first two seasons of Real World, as Shields himself points out, were much more “real” than subsequent seasons. The writers, cast members and directors of reality shows have increasingly opted for more scripted and constructed realities. Look how quickly we turned from “regular” human beings to B-list entertainers—people raised in the art of creating false personas—to star in our reality shows. Strange Love is a long way from Candid Camera. Perhaps these shows have only retained the label “reality” out of inertia.

Will anyone watch old seasons of these reality shows in thirty years? And yet I have little doubt that people will still be watching and analyzing The Wire, Seinfeld and The Sopranos for decades.

The old saying that you read nonfiction for the facts and fiction for the truth still rings true. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that narrative and characters connect you to the truth in a more powerful and emotional way. I would argue that The Wire will teach you about the failures of modern American institutions in a more memorable way than a social studies textbook.

But the second, more interesting, fiction, but not non-fiction, gets to suggest instead of tell. Fiction’s power is in its ambiguity. Christianity would have died out centuries ago if the Bible was a series of lists and essays instead of stories and parables whose meanings are both elusive yet powerful. Anyone who has studied literature in school knows that Shakespeare’s plays can be interpreted in infinite ways.

And ultimately, isn’t narrative fun? People enjoy reading interesting plots and following compelling characters, whether real or invented. Entertainment and enlightenment are not necessarily at odds.

We have heard the cries of the death of the novel for so long that even pointing out how many times we have heard it feels cliché. In a world where Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling are the best-selling authors, Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time and the biggest broadcast TV disaster occurred when NBC tried to push aside scripted dramas for an inexpensive talk show, speaking of societies hunger for reality over fictional narratives feels a little premature.

- Lincoln Michel

belief is absurd, but necessary

The "real self", that is, a coherent, unified subject underneath the show, is a fiction. There is nothing but the show itself.

Man is nothing in himself. Without the narratives, the clothing and the “things that make life the way we wish it were,” there is no one. That’s why we need to buy a life story. The nothingness is all the more apparent if we consider the impossibility of our autobiography. An autobiography is the history of one’s life written by oneself. The “I” is experienced by us as emptiness and as desire. In other words, as dissatisfaction. It is this constant dissatisfaction that creates what Marx identifies as “the proliferation of needs.” Rather than recognizing that we lack, we constantly strive to “make our lives as we wish they were.” The clothes in this case really do make the man. The narratives give us the sense of being the main character in a story far more interesting than the one we live. Now all I need to do to be that character is to buy the costume. I recognize the absurdity of it, but, ironically, I am still committed to the fiction. In fact, recognizing the absurdity only makes me more comfortable buying, as I at one and the same time recognize and refuse to recognize that there is nothing to me but the narratives. Kierkegaard, taking up a dictum attributed to the early Church Father Tertullian, said “I believe because it is absurd." Now we buy because it is absurd, but we have to if we are to maintain that fiction that gives us coherence, and we have to believe that it is absurd to avoid recognizing the lack of coherence, to avoid recognizing what reality shows us: that there is no unified subject beneath the appearance, that beneath the appearance there is no one at all.

The ironist recognizes this, but, necessarily, lives in the fiction. The ironist is in a much better position, however, than the cynic. Cynicism leaves one in an endless loop wondering why everyone doesn’t understand the contradictions he sees. The ironist does understand this and also understands her own commitment to the fiction. The cynic is frustrated that it doesn’t make sense that we participate in the fiction. The ironist simply smiles at it. She doesn’t experience the lack of a coherent self and consistent world. If she did, she would be psychotic. Nonetheless, the ironist recognizes the necessity of the fiction and appreciates the absurdity.

- Norah Martin

fictions--money, religion

By "performative ideology" Zizek means a form of ideological consciousness in which we know that we are dealing with a fiction, but in which the fiction nonetheless regulates our actual real behavior. Although we know that we are dealing with a fiction, we regulate reality as though the fiction were real. Ironically, in doing this we make the fiction real. Money is one example. When people use it, they know that there is nothing magical about it. It is a simply a means of exchange that gives the one who has it the right to certain things. The problem is that people act as if money in itself is wealth.

Religion is another example. Faith makes a fiction--money, religion--real.

the self as social construction

Identity is based on: consciousness/present awareness, memory, and relationships with other people and their memory and consciousness. Without these things, you have no identity. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? Can something exist without it being perceived? Without an objective transcendental God, no. Perception is dependent on the perceiver. If you lose your memory, your past identity disappears. Only because other people remember who you were, does a former remnant of your past identity remain. But take away those people and your previous identity disappears.

In one sense, then without your memory or consciousness, your relations with other people constitute your identity. Your personal identity is the composite of relational experiences that make up your personal history.

When near death, most people reminisce about the experiences of deep connections they had with others--family, friends, and colleagues. It is the empathetic moments in one's life that are the most powerful memories and the experiences that comfort and give a sense of connection, participation, and meaning to one's sojourn.

Is it no surprise then that over and over again in happiness research and throughout the teachings of every religion around the world, that happiness is said to be fundamentally centered around the quality of one's relations with other people, especially one's close friends and family. These people know you best, they are your link to this current life. They provide connection, meaning, and most importantly, existence.

When one’s very identity is relational and exists only to the extent one is embedded in a plethora of relationships, to be denied access is to be isolated and to cease to exist.

the pastiche personality

What does dramaturgical consciousness tell us about the psyche of the millennial generation? Many psychologists--perhaps most--agree that in a diverse, complex, interconnected world of increasing novelty and fast-changing contexts, with children growing growing up in both cyberspace and real space, and in both a parallel and linear temporality, multiple role-playing and myriad identities are becoming the norm. They disagree as to whether dramaturgical consciousness is necessarily leading to an advance in consciousness or possibly a disintegration.

Kenneth J. Gergen acknowledges that in a globalizing world that is connected at the speed of light, “we engage in greater numbers of relationships, in a greater variety of forms, and with greater intensities than ever before.” We are awash in relationships, some virtual, others real. Where privacy was the coveted value of a bourgeois generation which defined freedom in terms of autonomy and exclusivity, access is the most sought after value of the Millennial Generation, which defines freedom in terms of the depth and scope of one’s relationships. Exclusivity has become less important than inclusivity, and the competitive ethos is beginning to be challenged—albeit tentatively—by an ethos of collaboration.

In the era of dramaturgical consciousness, where one’s very identity is relational and exists only to the extent one is embedded in a plethora of relationships, to be denied access is to be isolated and to cease to exist. Alone time—as distinguished from being lonely –continues to shrink and is already approaching near zero in a 24/7 interconnected world. In a time society, every spare nanosecond becomes an opportunity to make “another connection.”

We live in a world in which getting and holding one another’s attention becomes paramount, and relationships of all kinds become central to our existence. The old idea of “mine versus thine,” which fostered the sense of a predictable “one-dimensional self,” is giving way to the new idea of inclusivity and a “multidimensional self.’’ Gergen observes:

The relatively coherent and unified sense of self inherent in a traditional culture gives way to manifold and competing potenials. A multiphrenic condiction emerges in which one swims in ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious currents of being.

Like improv artists caught up in ever-changing contexts and fast-moving story lines, each vying for our attention, we are forced to shift into new roles and switch back and forth between different sets and scripts so quickly that we risk slowly losing ourselves in the labyrinthine network of short-lived and ever-changing connections and experiences in which we find ourselves embedded. Gergen warns that:

This fragmentation of self-conceptions corresponds to a multiplicity of incoherent and disconnected relationships. These relationships pull us in myriad directions, inviting us to play such a variety of roles that the very concept of an “authentic self” with knowable characteristics recedes from view. The fully saturated self becomes no self at all.

Gergen worries that in the new world unfolding,

the self vanishes fully into a stage of relatedness…One ceases to believe in a self independent of the relationships in which he or she is embedded…thus placing relationships in the central position occupied by the individual self for the last several hundred years of Western history.

Most postmodern thinkers welcome the new sense of a relational self, suggesting that by breaking down the barriers of “mine versus thine,” we open up the possibility of a more tolerant, multicultural approach to socialization in the twenty-first century. Jean Baudrillard, for one, sees an unfolding globalized society in which “our private sphere has ceased to be the stage where the drama of the subject at odds with his objects is played out.”We no longer exist as subjects at all, argues Baudrillard, but, rather, “as terminals of multiple networks.”

Robert J. Lifton has another take on the shift in consciousness. Lifton believes that dramaturgical consciousness–having multiple personas is a coping mechanism, a way for the psyche to accommodate the escalating demands being placed on it in the emerging hyper-real global society. Lifton argues that playing roles and having multiple personas, far from representing the disappearance of self, is really a more plastic and mature stage of consciousness in which a person is able to live with ambiguities and complex and often competing priorities. Being able to live and experience as many potential realities as possible, sometimes even at the same time, says Lifton, requires a protean consciousness.

Gergen seems to share some common ground with Lifton, but with reservations. It’s not that Gergen is pessimistic about where human consciousness is heading. He would agree with the philosopher Martin Buber’s analysis of human nature. Buber believed that “in the beginning is the relationship.” Gergen sees a complex globalizing world in which human beings are becoming increasingly embedded in relationships of every style and kind. His concern is that the relational demands on our attention and psyche could overwhelm our individual and collective consciousness and plunge identity into chaos.

Gergen raises an important qualification that dramaturgical theorists often ignore or skirt. That is, that the dramaturgical way of thinking is unique to the modern age. He notes that,

The sense of “playing a role” depends for its palpability on the contrasting sense of a “real self.” If there is no consciousness of what it is to be “true to self” there is no meaning to “playing a role.”

By the time Shakespeare wrote that “All the world’s a stage, /And all the men and women merely players,” the self was already developed enough to understand when it was playing a role—the mind could separate itself sufficiently from its behavior to consciously take on a persona or mask and know that it was doing so. Today the self has to take on so many new roles and continually shift from role to role so quickly that it runs the risk of withering away altogether.

As the dramaturgical self becomes even more plastic and thespian, and such behavior comes to be thought of as normal, the very idea of authenticity recedes in importance. To be “authentic” presupposes an immutable core self, an autonomous psyche. In the era of dramaturgical consciousness, however,

the pastiche personality is a social chameleon, constantly borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available and constructing them as useful or desirable in a given situation.

The dramaturgical self, then, is open to two very different interpretations. Sociologist Louis Zurcher suggests that if we abandon the idea of the self as “an object” and think of it more as “a process,” then the self is open “to the widest possible experience” and becomes truly cosmopolitan.

But Zurcher also warns that the mutable self can just as easily lead to a more pronounced narcissism, as individuals lose a sense of an authentic self to which they are beholden and accountable and become mired in deceit after deceit—a Machiavellian existence—where role-playing becomes instrumental to advancing endless self-gratification.

Gergen, in the final analysis, appears guardedly optimistic about the future of human consciousness. He holds out hope that in an increasingly interconnected and collaborative world, made up of ever more embedded relationships that transcend traditional boundaries that separate “mine from thine,” that “we can move from a self-centered system of beliefs to consciousness of an inseparable relatedness with others”—I and thou. That’s possible, but only if we retain a sufficient sense of self as an “I” to allow the empathic impulse to grow.

While each of us is a composite of the relationships that makes us up, it is the unique constellation of relational experiences that separate one person from another. There is no in inherent contradiction in believing that the self is made up of the sum total of experiences that an indivdual is embedded in over a lifetime, and the idea that those same embedded relationships and experiences make one a unique being, different from all others. It is only by keeping that distinction in mind that empathic consciousness can continue to grow and become the psychic and social glue for a global consciousness.

If the sense of self as a unique ensemble of relationships is lost, and one becomes only a “we,” empathy is lost and the historical progression toward global consciousness dies. That’s because empathic awareness is born out of the sense that others, like ourselves, are unique, mortal beings. When we empathize with another, it’s because we recognize her fragile finite nature, her vulnerability, and her one and only life. We experience her existential aloneness and her personal plight and her struggle to be and succeed as if it were our own. Our empathic embrace is our way of rooting for her and celebrating her life.

If we fall prey to an undifferentiated global “we,” we may find ourselves back to square one, when we lived in an undifferentiated mythological fog, with little sense of self and only a rudimentary sense of empathic distress built into our biology. Maintaining a dialectic balance between an ever more differentiated sense of self, embedded in an ever more integrated relational web that encompasses the world, is the critical test that might well determine the future prospects for our survival as a species.

- Jermey Rifkin

the self as performance

Dramaturgical consciousness becomes almost a necessity in a complex, interconnected, high-speed civilization. If life is the acting out of countless personal and collective social dramas, then the more complex the economic and social networks in which one is embedded, the more diverse roles each person is called on to play.

In the dramaturgical way of looking at human behavior, the self is no longer a private possession of an individual but, rather, a sense given to a person by the very people he wishes to share it with. The self then, is not an entity, but rather a kind of fictional, constructed, consensually validated quality that results from the interaction and communication between people. If so, then one’s very being in the world depends on acting out scripts onstage with other players, each of whom validates a part of one’s selfhood. This view is quite different from Hegel’s notion that each person’s unique self is both imprinted in and manifested by the possessions he or she acquires over a lifetime.

The dramaturgical perspective places communications at the heart of human activity, redefines the self in relational terms, makes experience itself a theatrical affair, and transforms property into symbols that help people act out their many dramatic roles as they flit in and out of networks of lived experiences, each representing a different aspect of their life story. The dramaturgical perspective is, in the final analysis a vivid description of the state of mind that accompanies a generation that is continually shifting identities, roles, scripts, and stage settings, as it toggles between social and commercial networks, both in virtual and real space.

Dramaturgical consciousness raises the troublesome question of authenticity. Whenever the question of performance comes up, it inevitably leads to the related question of pretending versus believing.

In the age of mythical consciousness, being heroic was the measure of a man, while in the age of theological consciousness, one was expected to be pious, and in the age of ideological consciousness, men of goodwill were expected to be sincere, rational, and of good character. In the age of psychological consciousness, being personable and open-minded became an obsession. For the generation growing up in a dramaturgical consciousness, however, being authentic becomes the test of a man or woman.

If human beings are, by their very nature, dramaturgical, then how do we establish the idea of authenticity? If everyone is always consciously, or even unconsciously, playing out multiple roles with different scripts and on different stages, how do we know who the authentic person is behind all of the masks?

The question of authenticity is brought up whenever the dramaturgical theory of conscious behavior is used to describe how people act in social situations. Quite simply, there is the disquieting feeling that human behavior, if it is truly dramaturgical, is not very honest. After all, in one sense, theater without deceit is an impossibility. In another sense, however, taking on different masks—personas—in different situations might be an authentic expression of one aspect of a person’s identity. That is, if each of us is in fact a composite of multiple personalities, then the question is if we were true to the specific role we played at the moment.

Again, the theater offers a way to distinguish between pure deceit, on the one hand, and active imagination on the other hand. While deceit is universally disparaged, active imagination is lauded as essential to creating a sense of self and world and forming mature bonds of empathy. Theater theorists like Constantine Stanislavski talk about surface acting versus deep acting. The first relies on the art of deceit, the second on the art of imagination. Surface acting is form over substance, while deep acting emanates from deep inside the performer’s subconscious.

With surface acting, the performer uses grand gestures, modulated tones, and exaggerated movements to “portray” a character, but puts nothing of his own life into the part…it’s all technique. Stanislavski says of surface acting,

[its] form is more interesting than its content. It acts more on your sense of sound and sight than on your soul. Consequently it is more likely to delight than to move you…Only what can be accomplished through surprising theatrical beauty or picturesque pathos lies within the bounds of this art. But delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique. They call for natural emotions at the very moment in which they appear before you in the flesh. They call for the direct cooperation of nature itself.

In other words, with surface acting, the actor is acting as if he had feeling but not really feeling as he is acting. True deep acting, by contrast, which Stanislavski terms method acting, comes about when the actor reaches into his own subconscious and semiconscious memory and searches for an analogous past emotional experience that he might draw upon that would allow him to feel as if he were experiencing the emotional state of the character he is playing.

Stanislavski cautioned actors not to simply try to evoke a feeling de novo, saying that is not the way emotions are generated in real life. He writes,

On the stage there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the arousing of a feeling for its own sake…Never seek to be jealous, or to make love, or to suffer for its own sake.

Stanislavski points out that all feelings have a history—they are the result of past embodied experiences. Therefore, deep acting requires the actor to induce his own subconscious and remember how he felt and the emotions he conjured up in similar situations.

The aim of the actor’s preparation is to cross the threshold of the subconscious…Beforehand we have “true-seeming feeling,” afterwards “sincerity of emotion”.

Remembering experiences emotionally is important in calling them forth in the future. Stanisiavski asks his actors to train themselves to think of their feelings as an object as well as an experience, with the thought that they might be called up and used at a future time.

The memory of a past feeling, however, only becomes valuable to an actor if he can harness it with his imagination and act as if that feeling were happening again in the execution of his role. He must feel the role he is playing as if he were that person. With deep acting, an actor becomes transformed for a brief period of time and emotionally becomes what he is portraying. But when his performance ends, the part ends as well. In real life, we all engage in deep acting as well, but with a different modus operandi—affecting the reality of our relationships with others. In real life, deep acting has real-life real consequences.

In her book The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild reports on her study of Delta Airlines flight attendant training courses, where personnel were instructed in the proper emotional engagement with passengers. While the flight attendant training was purely instructional and did not involve attendants in deep acting, the attendants themselves reported that they often did so, on their own, when on the job.

A flight attendant might psych herself up before putting on the “happy face” by conjuring up past experiences that made her feel happy and bring those feelings to the job. One flight attendant told Hochschild that conjuring up a happy feeling and taking on a happy demeanor invariably has a positive feedback effect.

If I pretend I’m feeling really up, sometimes I actually get into it. The passenger responds to me as though I were friendly, and then more of me responds back.

Another flight attendant said that when she’s dealing with a passenger who’s been drinking too much or getting obnoxious,

I try to remember that if he’s drinking too much, he’s probably scared of flying. I think to myself, “He’s like a little child.” Really, that’s what he is. And when I see him that way, I don’t get mad that he’s yelling at me. He’s like a child yelling at me then.

Hochschild raises the very legitimate concern that acting is increasingly being used as a training technique to prepare a service workforce on how to manage their feelings to optimize commercial relationships in an experiential economy. That’s true, but it is also true that deep acting provides a theory and technique to help train individuals to be more mindful of their own feelings, to keep a firm memory of them, and to improve their ability to conjure up those memories from their subconscious and to harness them to their imagination when the occasion arises, so that they might experience another’s plight as if it were their own. Deep acting, when used for the appropriate pro-social ends, is a powerful mental tool to stimulate empathic feelings. And empathy is the means by which we participate in deeper realms of reality, for reality is the shared understandings we create about the world by dint of the relationships into which we enter.

Deep acting, then, can prepare people to extend the empathic bond and, with it, deepen one’s sense of reality--a far cry from surface acting, which conjures up only facsimiles in form and deceit in execution.

Meryl Streep, arguably the world’s greatest living actress and a master of deep acting, once remarked that “the great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.”

- Jeremy Rifkin

quotes on narrative and identity

Dialogue requires that in some way one abandons one's own position to enter into that of the other. The more I give myself to the other, the better I know myself and the more I acquire a unique identity.

Relationships shape our unique individual stories and identities.

Stories are the means by which we organize our experiences and try to find meaning in them. We are each a composite of the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories we tell others about us.

Our personal identity is really the composite of relational experiences that make up our personal history.

Journey and Return / Differentiation and Integration

Being exposed to individuals who are not part of one's collective kinship group has the effect of sharpening one's own sense of individuality, if only faintly. It is said that urban life creates isolation and aloneness. But it also creates a unique self able to identify with other unique selves by way of empathic extension. Partially weaned from the collectivity, one begins the process of reconnecting to others, this time as individual beings, and, by so doing, furthering one's own sense of selfhood.

reality as fiction

Why is that we have emotional responses to fiction when we know what is happening isn't real?

Part of the problem is that we don't believe that what we are watching is true.

The point doesn’t seem to be that we don’t believe what is happening is real, but rather that the way the story is told (and now the special effects which influence the realness of the way the story is told) seems to be more influential over how we respond to the story.

Some of the new fictional media even threaten to blur the line between the real and fictional worlds that we experience--some of it may have even made that line irrelevant. That is, we have not come to any conclusions as to whether or not we are able, imaginatively, to enter into fictional spaces in the same way that Neo enters the Matrix. And as Neo is told repeatedly, “you can’t be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it yourself.” Neo has to choose the red pill in order to experience this very different reality for himself. This is similar to the fact that I will never have the same experience or emotional response when someone tells me about a movie or a novel as when I see it or experience it for myself. Is it even possible that we, as viewers, could have the same sort of access to our fictional spaces that Neo had while he was in the desert of the real? Kendall Walton suggests that we experience fictions psychologically, in similar ways as children do physically when they play their games of make-believe. That would imply, however, that we really are able to enter into a fictional space in a way that is relevantly similar to the way Neo enters the reality that is the Matrix. Although we do not physically enter into another space, being able to explain the resulting emotional effects by saying that it is a cognitively similar experience would relieve us of the burden of explaining why we respond to things we believe not to be “real.” That is, if the experiences are cognitively similar, a “belief in the reality of” or the clear distinction between “real” and “unreal” becomes not just blurred but irrelevant.

Don’t misunderstand however. It is clear that we do not have to believe what is going on in the film in order to be affected by it. In fact, we cannot believe what is happening if we are to have an emotionally appropriate (aesthetic) response. This is especially true when it comes to tragedy or horror. Generally, we are not amused by others’ tragic lives nor do we derive pleasure out of watching people chased, stalked, or murdered. But in the context of a fiction, we often enjoy these things. We can enjoy them, however, if only we do not believe they are happening. We can enjoy watching Neo fighting Morpheus, after Neo has learned through a programmed computer simulation of a combination of martial arts, only if we know that neither of them is really being hurt. This goes even further with the kinds of special effects that The Matrix employs since what the viewer sees is what it would be like if time slowed down or even stopped. Since we know that this can’t happen, or it at least isn’t part of our experience we can still allow it to influence our response to the movie. (The bounds of these situations are also being stretched by the media with a new genre of voyeuristic television shows like Surivivor, Real World, and Big Brother. We may even get to the point where we do want to know the presentation is “real” in order to derive aesthetic pleasure out of it.)

The Matrix makes a number of clever and important references to Alice In Wonderland. Alice had many of the same problems in facing her strange new reality as did Neo. From the very beginning, Neo (still Thomas Anderson at that point, outside the rabbit hole) was told to follow the White Rabbit (tattoo), which ultimately led him to the reality. Once Neo arrived, Morpheus said to him, “I imagine right now you are feeling a bit like Alice--tumbling down the rabbit hole.” These explicit references make it clear that the kind of experiences the creators of the film were allowing Neo to have are parallel to the experiences that the viewers have of the film. As viewers, we watch and become increasingly more involved in the new reality that Neo experiences and we acclimate to the different reality at the same time Neo does. Since Alice in Wonderland is a fiction we are nearly all familiar with, we are taken (the viewers of the film and Neo at the same time) into a new wonderland of our own.

When we enter into a fictional world, or let the fictional world enter into our imaginations, we do not “willingly suspend our disbelief.” We cannot willingly decide to believe or disbelieve anything, any more than we can willingly believe it is snowing outside if all visual or sensory cues tell us otherwise. When engaging with fiction we do not suspend a critical faculty, hut rather exercise a creative faculty. We do not actively suspend disbelief, we actively create belief. As we learn to enter into fictional spaces (and I do believe this is something that we have to learn and that requires skills we must practice and develop) we desire more and more to experience the new space more fully. We want to immerse ourselves in the new world, just as Neo begins to immerse himself in the real world outside the Matrix. To do this we can focus our attention on the enveloping world and use our creative faculties to reinforce the reality of the experience, rather than to question it.

How does technologically sophisticated fiction, more and more like “real” events, produce emotive responses? Some argue that we have to understand the way emotions work in response to real events in order to understand how we respond emotively to fiction. This may not be the way to go, however, as it seems that the belief requirement that is missing from our interactions with fictional situations does not prohibit us from profoundly similar experiences physically and phenomenologically. If we feel the same and have relevantly similar emotional responses, why cannot the experience be said to be real? In many ways it can, but we are now getting into an area where fictional spaces and real spaces overlap and even unite. In the same way, the two worlds in The Matrix begin to overlap and unite. At one point, after Neo has been shaved and placed in his new digs, Morpheus takes him into an all white room. Neo is surprised to find that he is dressed the way that he would have been earlier. Morpheus explains to him that this is his “residual self-image” and that it is the “physical image of your digital self.” Neo’s old self-image crosses over from one world to the next. Similarly, Cypher can’t seem to give up the taste and texture of steak, even though he “knows” it isn’t real. Our knowledge of what is real and what isn’t real doesn’t necessarily change the way we behave or respond to these things. We may have to face the possibility that the line that divides appearance and reality (in the Matrix and in our own lives) is not as clear as we once thought it to be. We may even need to actively make that line disappear in order to make sense of our interactions with fictions.

In “reality,” we make judgments about people and situations without having full information all the time must do this just to be practical, since the time it would take to gather all the information we assume would he prohibitive to living our lives. We fill in the gaps of knowledge with guesses and prejudices of our own. Thus, reality may not be as “real” as we tend to think of it, since we do a fair amount of the construction on our own. We do the same with fiction, as we assume those we read about have had relevantly similar human lives, that they function as flesh and blood humans unless otherwise noted, and we assume that they live in a world that works physically in the same way as does ours. In both cases, in reality and with fiction, we are given a skeleton structure of what is happening, and we use our imaginations to fill in the details. With fiction, the structure is carefully constructed so we are given nearly all the relevant information. In reality, on the other hand, the information we use as a basis to construct a coherent understanding of a situation is not given to us in a carefully constructed way. Rather, we pick up certain details and make a comprehensible story of our own, using our own prejudices and biases, working necessarily from our own perspective, which is determined largely by our culture. If this is the case and we do have to create and fill in significant parts of our own realities, we are in a sense, making up our own stories these stories are our lives. Roger Schank explains in his book on narrative and intelligence that:

We need to tell someone else a story that describes our experience because the process of creating the story also creates the memory structure that will contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives. Talking is remembering . . . But telling a story isn’t rehearsal, it is creation. The act of creating is a memorable experience in itself.

We create meaning and memory through the hearing and telling of stories. Thus reality is more like fiction in terms of story creation than we originally thought, and the question of whether or not we must have a belief requirement in order to have a justified emotion seems now to be misguided.

Even if we do create our own stories to be reality (or our realities as stories) we still have a belief component missing from our assessment when we experience fictional simulations. If I believe that I am walking across the street, whether the cars are fictional or not, I am able to assess that I am in some mortal danger if I stay too long. If I make this assessment while playing a virtual reality game, I am not physically in any danger. Understanding how narrative undermines the distinction between reality and fiction does, however, make the paradox disappear in a certain sense. That is, the problem that we respond differently to fiction and reality no longer holds because the distinction between them has changed. If we put the fiction distinction aside and look to what it is that connects our understanding of both, namely how we comprehend narrative, we can begin to work with a more unified problem, one that will not always, ultimately, lead us to a paradox.

I am not suggesting that fiction and reality are the same or even that they are at times indistinguishable. There is a clear distinction between the epistemologcal (knowing what is real) and the ontological (the existence of things as they are) that will forever differentiate those for us. But what I am suggesting is a much stronger emphasis on how we make sense of both--that is, through narrative and story-telling. The way the story is told, or how it is that we create the story and make sense of it is similar for both fiction and reality. If it is the narrative that we are ultimately responding to, then it does not matter how we construe the emotions to work in response to real experiences and fictional ones--this is a false dichotomy that will continue to leave us in a paradox.

Further, if it is the narrative that we respond to, and the narratives are getting better or at least more vivid through technological developments, then it would make sense that we have increasingly stronger affective responses even though we “know” what we see or experience is not “real.” With the current state of the technology, especially with the kinds of special effects The Matrix provides, we are able to more fully experience both worlds and respond emotively to both. By moving the focus of the debate away from the belief requirement needed for “justified” emotions and understanding the role of stories more fully we can connect the divergent spaces of the real and the representational. We can further see how it is that we function in similar ways to the characters in The Matrix. Neo experiences a new reality as we experience it along with him in parallel ways we never before imagined.

- Sarah Worth

memory is constructed like plot

Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on--however removed that may be from reality.

Anything processed by memory is fiction. Consciously or unconsciously, we manipulate our memories to include or omit certain aspects. Are our memories therefore fictions?

collage as reality, not narrative

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation. Life, though—standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night at us—flies at us in bright splinters.

Life does not have a “plot”. It is a collage.

Story/narrative seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

I’m not interested in collage as the refuge of the compositionally disabled. I’m interested in collage as an evolution beyond narrative.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.

If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farm, you do a sort of bricolage. Bits of string and wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like the spider.

The main question collage artists face: you’ve found some interesting material—how do you go about arranging it?

"realism" = perception

In Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf describes the dilemma of Charles Steele, who’s painting a still-life portrait: a cloud drifts into view, Mrs. Flanders’s sons run around the beach, she grows upset about the letter she’s writing, and she won’t stop moving. If Charles instructs Mrs. Flanders to stop moving, he’s altering the world in order for it to match what he wants to paint, rather than shaping his painting to reflect what’s actually occurring in the world.

There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.

There is properly no history, no biography.

memoir

We too can make a myth out of our meager circumstances.

narrative-->modernism-->reality show

Reality is messy, it doesn't fit a neat, compelling narrative. As art gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more true to reality, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art, underprocessed, underproduced, splinters and explodes. An unfiltered documentary is fragmented, its meaning and purpose ambigious, ambivalent.

In contrast, memoir is constructed, because it's based on memory. Narrative is like memory. It is unreliable, constructed to create a certain effect.

How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? Many memoirs make a virtue of seeming unadorned, unvarnished, but the first and most unforgettable thing we learn about memory is that it's fallible. Memories, we now know, can be buried, lost, blocked, repressed, even recovered. We remember what suits us, and there's almost no limit to what we can forget. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago. The rest of us recall only the most intense moments, and even these tend to have been mythologized by repetition into well-wrought chapters in the story of our lives. To this extent, memoirs really can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator.

Memoir is a construct used by publishers to niche-market a genre between fact and fiction; an attempt to close in on its twin sister, the reality-show.

People in the 19th century started to get sick of narrative with all of its refined literary and plot devices. Modernism was the shift back to simplicity, a turn back toward messy, hard to understand, fragmented reality.

Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground.

Abstract expressionism in art was a similar attempt to recapture reality through its technique of spontaneous creation on the canvas. Rejected at first, it was accepted by the Establishment in the mid-20th century. Pollack and Rothko are now considered artistic geniuses because they forced artists to rethink the role and purpose of painting.

Then people got sick of abstract, difficult documentary-art. A longing for narration, story, archetype rose up again. But we didn't go right back to poetry with rhyme, novels with plot, art with representation, music with melody and harmony...we got jazz, the reality-show, the memoir, the remix, a hybrid of real and fake, the authentic fake. It had both the spontaneity of life (reality) with the order and appeal of narration and myth.

the hero's journey

To recap the Hero's Journey:

I. Heroes are introduced in the ORDINARY WORLD, where

2. they receive the CALL TO ADVENTURE.

3. They are RELUCTANT at first or REFUSE THE CALL, but

4. are encouraged by a MENTOR to

5. CROSS THE FIRST THRESHOLD and enter the Special World, where

6. they encounter TESTS, ALLIES, AND ENEMIES.

7. They APPROACH THE INMOST CAVE, crossing a second threshold

8. where they endure the ORDEAL.

9. They take possession of their REWARD and

10. are pursued on THE ROAD BACK to the Ordinary World.

11. They cross the third threshold, experience a RESURRECTION, and are transformed by the experience.

12. They RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR, a boon or treasure to benefit the Ordinary World.

why we have religion and spirituality

Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear…When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him?

- Upnishads

I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

- Willa Cather

Wilson examines religion from this co-evolutionary perspective. The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together; and despite the vast variation in the world's religions, Wilson shows that religions always see to coordinate and orient people's behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, sometimes for the purpose of competing with other groups.

Wilson shows how religious practices help members solve coordination problems. For example, trust and therefore trade are greatly enhanced when all parties are part of the same religious community, and when religious beliefs say that God knows and cares about the honesty of the parties. Respect for rules is enhanced when rules have an element of sacredness, and when they are backed up by supernatural sanction and the gossip or ostracism of one's peers. Wilson's claim is that religious ideas, and brains that responded to those ideas, co-evolved. Even if the belief in supernatural entities emerged originally for some other reason, or as an accidental byproduct in the evolution of cognition, groups that parlayed those beliefs into social coordination devices (for example, by linking them to emotions such as shame, fear, guilt, and love) found a cultural solution to the free-rider problem and then reaped the enormous benefits of trust and cooperation. If stronger belief led to greater individual benefits, or if a group developed a way to punish or exclude those who did not share in its beliefs and practices, conditions were perfect for the co-evolution of religion and religious brains.

Religion, therefore, could have pulled human beings into the group-selection loophole. By making people long ago feel and act as though they were part of one body, religion reduced the influence of individual selection (which shapes individuals to be selfish) and brought into play the force of group selection (which shapes individuals to work for the good of their group). But we didn't make it all the way through the loophole: Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism. Which side of our nature we express depends on culture and context. When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.

Reading Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral is like taking a journey to Spaceland. You can look down on the vast tapestry of human cultures and see why things are woven in the way that they are. Wilson says his own private hell would be to be locked forever into a room full of people discussing the hypocrisies of religion, for example, that many religions preach love, compassion, and virtue yet sometimes cause war, hatred, and terrorism. From Wilson's higher perspective, there is no contradiction. Group selection creates interlocking genetic and cultural adaptations that enhance peace, harmony, and cooperation within the group for the express purpose of increasing the group's ability to compete with other groups. Group selection does not end conflict; it just pushes it up to the next level of social organization. Atrocities committed in the name of religion are almost always committed against out-group members, or against the most dangerous people of all: apostates (who try to leave the group) and traitors (who undermine the group).

A second puzzle that Wilson can solve is why mysticism, everywhere and always, is about transcending the self and merging with something larger than the self. When William James analyzed mysticism, he focused on the psychological state of "cosmic consciousness" and on the techniques developed in all the major religions to attain it. Hindus and Buddhists use meditation and yoga to attain the state of sarnadhi, in which "the subject-object distinction and one's sense of an individual self disappear in a state usually described as one of supreme peace, bliss, and illumination. James found much the same goal in Christian and Muslim mysticism, often attained through repetitive prayer. He quoted the eleventh-century Muslim philosopher Al Ghazzali, who spent several years worshipping with the Sufis of Syria. Al Ghazzali attained experiences of "transport" and revelation that he said cannot be described in words, although he did try to explain to his Muslim readers the essence of Sufism:

The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God.

From Wilson's perspective, mystical experience is an "off" button for the self. When the self is turned off, people become just a cell in the larger body, a bee in the larger hive. It is no wonder that the after effects of mystical experience are predictable; people usually feel a stronger commitment to God or to helping others, often by bringing them to God.

The neuroscientist Andrew Newberg has studied the brains of people undergoing mystical experiences, mostly during meditation, and has found where that off-switch might be. In the rear portion of the brain's parietal lobes (under the rear portion of the top of the skull) are two patches of cortex Newberg calls the "orientation association areas." The patch in the left hemisphere appears to contribute to the mental sensation of having a limited and physically defined body, and thus keeps track of your edges. The corresponding area in the right hemisphere maintains a map of the space around you. These two areas receive input from your senses to help them maintain an ongoing representation of your self and its location in space. At the very moment when people report achieving states of mystical union, these two areas appear to be cut off. Input from other parts of the brain is reduced, and overall activity in these orientation areas is reduced, too. But Newberg believes they are still trying to do their jobs: The area on the left tries to establish the body's boundaries and doesn't find them; the area on the right tries to establish the self's location in space and doesn't find it. The person experiences a loss of self combined with a paradoxical expansion of the self out into space, yet with no fixed location in the normal world of three dimensions. The person feels merged with something vast, something larger than the self.

Newberg believes that rituals that involve repetitive movement and chanting, particularly when they are performed by many people at the same time, help to set up "resonance patterns" in the brains of the participants that make this mystical state more likely to happen. The historian William McNeill, drawing on very different data, came to the same conclusion. When McNeill was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941, basic training required that he march for hundreds of hours on the drill field in close formation with a few dozen other men. At first, McNeill thought the marching was just a way to pass the time because his base had no weapons with which to train. But after a few weeks of training, the marching began to in duce in him an altered state of consciousness:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive wellbeing is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.

Decades later, McNeill studied the role that synchronized movement—in dance, religious ritual; and military training—has played in history. In Keeping Together in Time, he concludes that human societies since the beginning of recorded history have used synchronized movement to create harmony and cohesion within groups, sometimes in the service of preparing for hostilities with other groups. McNeill's conclusion suggests that synchronized movement and chanting might be evolved mechanisms for activating the altruistic motivations created in the process of group selection. The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers. McNeill quotes an extraordinary passage from the book The Warriors: Reflections of Men in Battle that describes the thrilling communal state that soldiers sometimes enter:

“I” passes insensibly into a "we," “my" becomes "our" and individual fate loses its central importance…I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments relatively easy…I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.

There is indeed something larger than the self, able to provide people with a sense of purpose they think worth dying for: the group. (Of course, one group's noble purpose is sometimes another group's pure evil.) What can you do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life? What is the answer to the question of purpose within life? I believe the answer can be found only by understanding the kind of creature that we are, divided in the many ways we are divided. We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger. We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for effectance, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work. We are the rider and we are the elephant, and our mental health depends on the two working together, each drawing on the others' strengths. I don't believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, "What is the purpose of life?" Yet by drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science, we can find compelling answers to the question of purpose within life. The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality.

Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.

- Jonathan Haidt