Words and the Stories We Tell: How Our Narratives Shape Reality

Words! The Way is beyond all language, for in it there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.
–Sengstan

As I see it, beginning with the body: from conception to death the body’s journey comes with a built-in narrative — the natural growing process itself is what provides the narrative structure (we call it): infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age and death. Physiologically, the body develops physical needs as it grows. It needs many things just to stay alive, but over time those needs change for various different reasons depending on the body’s stage of development in the natural physiological narrative. 

Words: human beings are meaning-making creatures. We tell stories to ourselves to make sense of the body’s experiences. As the body goes through its many changes, so do the stories we tell to make sense of the changes. The narratives evolve to make sense of life, often at the cost of dismissing previous, less-informed narratives. This is how we grow: the narratives are always changing — (unless we get stuck, or in some cases choose not to evolve). These narratives are fictions: they are entirely made up in response to conditions and circumstances. (What we call the “self” is a result of the narratives we create: we are the “narrators”).

Narratives are the heart and soul of the ego: the personal, subjective manifestation of I-my-me-mine. The personal narratives that have evolved over time in response to the body’s physical journey give our lives meaning. Inevitably, we become attached to these narratives — our stories are us: or so they would have us believe. The will to live, though instinctive, is at least partially rooted in our stories and mythologies; we’ll do most anything to protect and defend the stories that give life meaning.

(Delusions, greed and anger — the Three Poisons)

Sometimes, however, the more involved and the more sophisticated our stories become, the more removed they are from reality and from the truths that precede the subjective narratives. The more our sense of self depends upon the narratives, the more defensive we are about those narratives and the more powerful those narratives become. When the narratives are far removed from reality they become delusions. Often, the delusions become more deeply entrenched in a culture because they are shared and propagated by many people. This can result in prejudices and biases of all kinds: racism and sexism for example. 

A similar thing happens when needs become desires: needs that have been fetishized by the narrator often evolve into desires. We need food, but we desire double-chocolate cake. When desire becomes greed, it’s when the need for food is satisfied but the desire for double-chocolate cake leads to yet another and another slice of cake but with ice cream. When the narrator can’t satisfy its desires for more cake it typically gets angry. Likewise, when the narrator deprives someone of their basic needs, they get angry. But where does this anger come from? It all comes from delusion — the same delusions that have evolved due to the stories we tell as egocentric meaning-making creatures. 

The result is that life often becomes more about the stories we tell about it than about life itself before the narratives. In the realm of non-stop narratives, for example, a person is never just a person but a member of a discourse community created by and participating in a narrative construct. When everything about the physical reality of living has morphed into a fiction, and the fiction carries more weight than physical reality, extreme events like world wars and climate change can occur because seeing the truth is often secondary to the fiction created by the search for the truth, for understanding and meaning. 

Delusions are fueled by self-interest. The ego/narrator fears nothing more than that which threatens it and what it desires and believes. When the ego’s narrative is challenged by a different ego’s narrative it gets very defensive. Why? It’s because the ego believes itself to be true reality and not what it really is: a fiction, entirely made up. 

There’s no doubt: these fictions can be useful. When people say that human beings aren’t born with instruction manuals it’s not really true: there are libraries filled with instruction manuals that tell us how to live, how to behave, how to prosper and thrive and even how to die. But while books can be a source of profound wisdom, the mass media in general can also be a source of gross ignorance and used to perpetuate the willful ignorance of those for whom selfish and deranged political purposes are the motivating factors of their being.

Some people see a beautiful green meadow with lush rolling hills and tall grass and birds singing, and other people looking upon the same view see prime real estate and imagine a shopping mall and parking lot replacing the meadow. This is how conflict occurs, and in the narrative realm of purely subjective fictions conflict is inevitable. Planet earth, when seen from space, has no boundaries separating countries. And yet, upon this one planet there are many countries, indeed, many worlds, all with both slightly and extremely different narratives separating them.

What it all comes down to is this: our essential common humanity becomes subject to fiercely competing narratives. Our job (the Bodhisattva path) as civilized, educated human beings is to strive to find in one another our common humanity (common narrative) and to live with empathy, kindness and compassion for the sake of all. This is not easy, obviously. There has never been peace on earth and good will to all. That’s because the more intensely people are bound by their narratives the less freedom they have to think clearly and act freely for the benefit of others and the common good. 

A consistent practice of meditation provides an opportunity to drop all narratives and become clear — at least for a moment. When developed over time through continuous meditation practice, this clarity allows us to respond freshly and without hindrance to whatever conditions arise so that a correct response may occur spontaneously without the prejudices of our habitual narratives. Without attachment to our subjective narratives, we are more capable of living a life in service to others from moment to moment than when we are bound by the rules of a limited personal fiction. 

Meditation is not about “stopping thoughts” any more than it is about stopping hearing or smelling or tasting or touching or seeing. One could say that meditation allows us to witness all of these physiological experiences without the constant narratives that are always assessing and judging and coloring these experiences based on the subjective ego’s prejudices. To understand the activity of thinking and awareness as an ongoing, ever-changing experience can protect us from becoming ruled solely by our subjective narratives and being bound to them. Some narratives are useful and some are not. Some narratives are hurtful while others are helpful. Wisdom means being able to understand the function of the different narratives and then to be able to employ “skillful means” — upaya — to use what is useful or discard what is harmful. 

With consistent meditation practice as part of a regular routine, practitioners can lighten the load of the burdensome routine of habitual judging, assessing and fantasizing, and live more freely in the present moment. As has been said a million times before, the past is just an idea, the future is also just an idea, and the present is an instant that immediately becomes the past as soon as one thinks about the present. The stories, the subjective narratives, the universal fictions all have unreliable narrators. This is why similes and metaphors, myths and parables exist: language is always a step removed from reality. Some questions worth asking are: When do we use our narratives, and when do our narratives use us? Are we ever free and do we ever think for ourselves? Why do I think what I think? Where do my opinions even come from? 

Contemplating the above questions can be useful, up to a point. Only when we realize the endless, “yes, but” labyrinth of our thinking minds can we step back and see the vibrant activity of consciousness itself: unfixed, never stagnant, forever lively and in motion. Pure awareness is without subject and object because it does not judge; therefore, we can say that pure awareness is without self. Yet, it is from that point of selfless awareness that self is born — this is the activity of being and non-being and the origin of narratives: Tatagatha.

The Wedding Feast at Cana, from the Gospel of John, is a good story to use to illustrate the point I’m trying to make. It is the occasion for the first miracle that Jesus performs after being in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights being tempted by the devil. That’s the crucial part of the story. The miracle part of the parable happens, and could only happen, after the necessary retreat to the desert to meditate and be tempted by the devil. 

The parable begins: “On the third day…” One must ask, on the third day from what: On the third day from 40 days and 40 nights being tempted by the devil. In myths and parables, numbers have significance. The number 3 for example, typically represents completion of the whole — beginning, middle and end — the unification of body, soul and spirit, birth, life, death. The number 40 represents a period of trial or probation or initiation: 40 days and 40 nights fasting and then being tempted by the devil.  (The devil’s temptations — power, fame and material success — are all directed towards the ego that Jesus has shed while fasting and meditating).

So, “On the third day” there’s a wedding and Jesus is there with his disciples and his mother. Whose wedding is it? There’s no mention of the bride and groom or why Jesus and his mother and disciples are even there. Were they wedding crashers? Is that why they ran out of wine in the first place? So Jesus’s mother, Mary, tells Jesus about it and he says, “Woman, what’s that got to do with me?” Mary then tells the steward to do whatever Jesus tells him to do and Jesus says, “Take 6 stone jars and fill them with water, and then give a taste to the head steward and see what he thinks.” The number 6 in myths and parables represents equilibrium, harmony: the union of polarities. The stewards then fill the 6 stone jars with water and the head steward drinks the water now turned into wine and says, “Most people serve the best wine first, and when everyone’s drunk they serve the lousy wine, but you have saved the best wine for last.” And that’s the story– the moral is? Jesus is a good guy to have around at weddings just in case you run out of wine? No.

This parable breaks it all down to levels of consciousness: stone, water and wine. The number 3 as well as the wedding suggests the union of masculine and feminine, yin and yang, plus and minus, positive and negative — the activity of being that Jesus experienced in the desert. This wedding in Cana could be seen as the wedding of Jesus to the “the Way, the Truth, and the Light.” Wine, in traditional mythology in almost all cultures, has been a symbol for transcendence of one kind or another. It can be both a symbol of enlightenment and one of delusion. Stone, in mythology, often represents the hard truth, the law, the foundation, the facts — written in stone — eternal truth or laws. Water is almost universally known in all mythologies as the source of life. Water is alive. Water is what keeps us all alive. There is nothing without water.

If we add all this up, according to traditional mythological motifs and symbols we get this: the stone jars represent the laws, the good ideas and traditions from the best minds of the times, and the living water is what brings the best ideas to life and sets them in motion, and when the right ideas and the right spirit come together, you get wine: transcendence. But it was the 40 days and 40 nights in the desert that made this wedding possible, and that’s the crucial part of the story.

The desert taught Jesus that good words and ideas aren’t enough. It’s not enough just to believe in the stone laws one must pour life into them before they can become wine. One must finally go beyond all narratives, all boundaries, all artificial barriers, and see clearly our common humanity that precedes all narratives. Every person is a version of you, and you are a version of everyone else. From a certain perspective, if I were you, you are who I’d be. If you were I, I am who you’d be. Before thinking, we come from and go to the same place and are the same one except that we just don’t know it, we only think we’re different and separate. 

And so I end where I started: Beginning with the body: from conception to death the body’s journey comes with a built-in narrative — the natural growing process itself is what provides the narrative structure: infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, old age and death. We tell stories to make sense of these events, and that means anything is possible. 

Our narratives matter; they can be for better or worse. But to step back and see how these narratives are invented, created, and finally acted out, is to take an important step in understanding where narratives come from and why we think what we think. We’re all in this together, but each with our separate, individual narratives. So how do we find our common humanity in the midst of these often conflicting stories? By putting them all down and getting them all out of the way if only long enough to know them for what they are: unreliable fictions subject to constant revisions. But that takes work, hard work, 40 days and nights fasting in the desert. 

In the realm of language, written or spoken, there is always “yes, but.” My reading of the Wedding Feast at Cana is only one possible interpretation of the story and no doubt would irritate many people, especially those who believe in the inerrancy of the bible’s stories and take them literally. Cultures again and again have waged war against others for disagreements over the meaning of a text. Such is the power of language — of fictions — to influence human behavior. 

Yet language and the stories we tell are precisely what make us human and what make the world we live in what it is, and that’s why it’s so important to understand how these fictions come into being, and why. To step back and see is a first step towards empathy — you must put yourself in someone else’s shoes in order to understand their story, and that means getting your own ego-based fictions out of the way first. To really understand someone’s story from that person’s point of view and to realize that under certain circumstances that could be you is a first step towards compassion. Compassion leads the way to kindness and consideration, good will and generosity. Good will and generosity lead to acting for the benefit of others. When that happens, everyone wins. But again, that takes work. 

We can’t all leave our families and jobs and go fast in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, (or spend a summer on a meditation retreat), but we can all stop for 15 or 20 minutes or a half hour a day to sit still and just breathe and be and put it all down right where we are. With enough practice, the clarity and openness experienced on the meditation cushion comes with us into the world of our everyday lives. 

Meditation is not a selfish act — just the opposite. Meditation breaks the hard spell of our individual narratives and allows us the freedom to see beyond the limitations that our personal, carefully crafted fictions impose on us. We realize that there’s more to life than just the stories we tell about it: there is life before thinking and before words and that’s where we can find and nurture our common humanity. 

Sit and see for yourself. 

Seido Ray Ronci, Hokoku-An Zendo

Fall 2021