Story and Belief

Indigenous peoples know that it is story that weaves together the fabric of our lives. The past, present and future are all understood through story. This is true for all of us but Indigenous peoples have a conscious awareness of how story works. They know that story is not just a way to communicate our experiences of reality. In the West we fight about whose story is real. While Indigenous peoples know that all stories are real; because the world we live in is created by the stories we tell.

Science tells us that every direct experience becomes stored in our brains in the form of story. The moment when a direct experience becomes a thought, it is already part of a story. We cannot escape this. It is how our brain works. There are collective stories that evolve over time in any given culture and within these; there are individual stories that we tell ourselves to make sense of our day-to-day lives. The problem is that in the West, we tend to cling to our stories because we think they reflect reality. We have our own stories, which are true, and then there are the stories of others, which must be untrue if they conflict with our own. What is lost in this position is the understanding that there is no single truth or reality: there is only perception. Our perceptions will reflect, and be reflected in, our personal and collective stories, yet perception is just another way of saying; “the story I believe in”. Once we understand how this works, we can free ourselves from the parts of our stories that cause us pain and unhappiness. Because our stories create the world we live in, we are free to create a different world, a happier one and a healthier one. This shift does not have to happen all at once. It only requires us, as individuals, to each become aware of how we use our personal stories to embed pain in our lives, and how we subscribe to collective stories that create pain.

Neurobiologists have shown that our brains do not take experiences and store them as isolated pieces of information. Our brains absorb each new experience, make connections to other similar experiences, and then link each new piece of information within the context of a larger story. Most of the time we don’t go through this process consciously. Stories develop in our minds as our brains link and code and manage the endless stream of new information coming in. This happens automatically and there is no way to escape the process. However, we can become aware of the process and make conscious adjustments to the stories that we develop.

Our stories are an integral part of us as human beings. I believe we should love and honor them, but at the same time we must acknowledge that they are just stories, and as such, we can change any part of them that is causing us pain. Of course, as part of the evolutionary process, stories change of their own accord. We all know that stories change with the retelling. Yet, we choose to ignore this fact most of the time. What I am suggesting is that we adapt our stories purposively, consciously. Instead of thinking of stories as something separate from truth, I am suggesting we acknowledge that the existence of story is the only truth there is, and consequently there will always be multiple truths.

We all create our own self-stories and then use them to interpret the world around us. These stories define our relationships and the world we perceive. They consequently define our ongoing life experiences as we tend to experience life in ways that validate our stories. This process has been well accepted by psychologists for decades however, less attention has been paid to the collective aspect of our stories. We do not create our stories as isolated individuals; we create them within a historical and political context. Fundamental parts of our story are defined by our ancestors and by the cultures within which we are born and live.

Story has always been important to me but for most of my life I perceived story as something quite separate from reality. I saw story as something that might be more or less true or perhaps completely untrue; but certainly different from the real world, which I accepted as unquestionable. What I now acknowledge is that the material world (or the real world), is in fact made up entirely of our stories. There is no sense in which the world exists outside our perception of it, or outside the stories we create about it. There is no single reality, no objective truth and no material world, that exists independently of our individual and collective stories.

We create our stories within the cultural and personal expectations of those close to us. Sometimes we move outside of those boundaries, and sometimes we are firmly reigned in. For many people, life can seem like a long stream of stories full of pain and disappointment. For others, life is experienced as a series of stories of good fortune and accomplishment. Quite often we reach well into adulthood before we really look inside to connect with who we are beyond all these stories. For some people this happens as a consequence of a serious illness, for others it comes as the result of a deep depression – the sensation of not being part of any story at all. Nonetheless, it is only when we reach deep into ourselves and connect with that still place that is inside us, beyond the stories, when we connect with a real sense of self. We connect with our own truth, beyond the expectations of others, beyond the stories we have built up since our birth. From this point, we can begin to create a story that carries happiness rather than pain.

This is not about ‘thinking positively’, it is not about thinking at all. Thinking only takes us back through the myriad of culturally specific stories we have stored, filed and have ready to go in our brains. We can tell ourselves positive affirmations as often as we like, but if the positive affirmations conflict with the story we truly believe, they won’t have any lasting benefit. Our brain will repeat the words, and we may even believe them at the conscious level, yet sub-consciously, our mind is telling us, “that doesn’t resonate with my story about how helpless I am”, or “what a dangerous world we live in”. In order to create health and happiness we need to change our perceptions of the world; not on the surface of our minds where thinking occurs, but deep within our minds where our sub-conscious beliefs gather.

Perceptions are a complicated mix of our individual experiences and the culture within which we grow up, and they develop over our lifetime. Our individual perceptions change and adjust constantly in response to new information and new experiences. However, they often only change within the context of our story. If we perceive the world as a dangerous place, the majority of our experiences will be understood in ways that validate that perception, that story.