TOPIC
The human group - session 97 - narrative capture
Words are spells, spelled with letters with particular sounds, building stories and dreams that create boundaries, rights and wrongs and can contain us in a particular way of life and perspective.
We can be captured by these spells, these stories.
Stories on every scale from the scientific laws, governmental, cultural traditions, societal expectations, familial habits of meaning making to personal ideas we create and perpetuate about ourselves
We can attach ourselves to stories that have a rewarding function and a cost.
Are you captured by a narrative?
How are these narratives used by the media to swing our values?
What are the ethics of narrative capture? Are we even aware of its power and potential for abuse?
What if we create our own narratives?
REFLECTION
Narrative capture captured our attention leading us to question the barriers formed by particular worldviews and perspectives. Questions delivering pathways through the sometimes blinding influence of a rewarding story. We discovered the narratives repeatedly heard or practiced become the worlds we live within. Even the lies we tell ourselves and others become the stories we believe and consequently affect our decision making.
What if we bring a magical mythopoetic angle to the power of words?
The perspective, story, interpretation becomes an incantation and if vulnerable to capture there is an alluring and seductive affect, otherwise know as a charm. Why is there an allure to a story? A desire to take the story’s view and place it as a puzzle piece within our own scope and perspective on the way things are. Do we continue to chop and change our worldview until it is rewarding and comfortable? What is the reward and is there a cost? Does every narrative we allow ourselves to be captured by blind us from the present real time story playing out in the moment?
One human shared an insightful perspective on the depths of narrative capture; every time we speak we capture ourselves and that words are a bridge from the inner world to the outer world.
Are we unaware of the power of speech?
And if speech is the bridge from the inner to the outer could this mean that if we have no internal power we speak incantations in order to quell our inner chaos? Or that the stories we subscribe to are rewarding in the delusional spell of ego, security and order that medicates our inner turbulence. Another addiction of which we have become attached and who’s cause and core we refuse to treat or even confront. The addiction to comforting stories.
We are bumbling about and tripping ourselves over as we clumsily paint our worldview with our exaggerations, lies, simplifications, mindless and faulty speech in order to feel an internal sense of order or self-worth.
We seem to be vulnerable to narrative capture when we have no internal locus of control; the ability to sit with our own unpleasant sensations; our traumas. Being that we are each traumatised to a certain degree, as a population we are a vulnerable mass of magical beings whose powers are easily coopted by those voices that have the greatest amplification.
What ingredients to a story capture an individual?
Fear and scarcity seem to be the most readily available white sugar ingredient that sways our autonomy. Inspiration and love are powerful but rare ingredients that not only capture us but greet us on the full spectrum of consciousness; emotional, spiritual, mental and physical. Both these ingredients are addictive and can lead to living a life within the dream or spell of another. Somewhere along the way we need to take our own power back and start to chant our own spells.
There are many modalities and disciplines that enable us a pathway from narrative capture that does not serve us or our environment. Vipassana, taught by Goenka Ji, originating as the meditation practice of the buddha without the religion of buddhism. This practice allows us to sit in meditation with our ever changing internal landscape, giving us the tools to navigate internal volatility without projecting it onto the external world. We extend our freedom between stimulus and response.
Another platform is Landmark, a self development forum that allows us to see the stories we have become imprisoned by whilst giving us the opportunity to write our own stories and action them.
Gandhi with his simple but timeless quote:
‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’
Is yet another spell that can set us free.
As our small and intimate group became more and more inspired as we discovered the bewildering power of narrative capture, we pieced together tools ourselves.
Tools to escape narrative capture:
Imagination
As one person quoted another; ‘Climate change is a crisis of the imagination.’
Whether it is to let go of the idea that nothing changes to simply contemplate climate change or our stubborn focus upon human induced climate change is a crisis of the imagination. Each has a story and each narrative has captured almost everyone. Our imagination creates trajectories to futures we wish to live within. We must imagine the change we wish to see beyond the way things are and beyond the threat of climate change.
Embodiment
Returning to the home of story; the body. Where the first sensations stimulated meaning making, separated us from the the body and sent us traveling in the world of the mind. Returning to the body allows us to treat the cause, to feel, to accept, to surrender and allow for the real time being to unfold before us.
Curiousity
With wonder and awe our curious questions are an opening to understanding. Most spells can be broken with a swift question, dispelling the delusion. They however, must be open questions; how, why, what, questions that cannot be answered with a yes or a no.
Letting go of being right
When we are caught in the poles of right and wrong within a certain narrative we are captured. In giving up our need to be right the power of the narrative is halved in its potency to control us.
Forgiveness
Letting go of our external projections and returning to our self-responsibility. In blaming others for our misgivings we fragment our power to change. Forgiveness is a great returning and empowering tool.
All of these characteristics and many more culminate within the archetype of the fool. Led by curiousity, taken by the bliss and joy of embodiment and the present, acting upon our imaginings and letting go of the past we walk into a world our hearts know is possible.
This all starts on an individual level as we each choose to lead ourselves. Our lives and our creations, as extensions of our way of being, inspire others without enslaving them. Disrupting monopolies of narrative capture until the collective manifestation is made up of empowered individuals charming themselves into following their inherent nature in which re-organises our human blight as a complimentary aspect of the Earth’s macro-biome. The potential of aligning ourselves with life upon the earth and the movements of the universe has a potential of which our imaginations only just reach the edge.
Love x
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