Why We Should Look Further into the Stories we Love

Why We Should Look Further into the Stories we Love

I remember analyzing books during high school lectures and thinking, "why do all these people assume the author actually considered all of these complicated things while writing? They were probably just trying to tell a good story." To be honest, I just thought they were just making up things to waste time. I was all for random chemistry or physics experiments, I spent so much time on my egg drop experiment from physics, it was ridiculous, but didn’t see anything to gain from a literature experiment… that is until I stumbled across the idea of archetypal symbols, and even if I wasn’t curious, to keep my old sentiment I would have to debunk it.

My mom’s favorite book growing up was a wrinkle in time, and when it came out in theaters we went to see it. It impacted me so profundity that I downloaded the book on my way home. The story starts with a mom who is a scientist, who is cooking dinner in the lab next to the kitchen. “Over a Bunsen burner bubbled a big, earthenware dish of stew. Don’t tell Sandy and Dennys I’m cooking out here,” she said. “They’re always suspicious that a few chemicals may get in with the meat, but I had an experiment I wanted to stay with.”

The mother in the story is super solid, she is very kind and very intelligent, a role model for an intuitive/emotional person who has integrated their intellect. When I read “chemicals in the meat,” I immediately thought of emotions, and how they often feel more like a chemical mess contaminating the meat of the conversation. Here the main character was in between two worlds, one world where his twin brothers couldn’t handle even the possibility of chemicals or emotions contaminating an intellectual idea, and his mother who was master of both worlds.

“Okay,” I thought, “we’ll see how well this matches up with what I already know about neuroscience and believe about psychology.” His father was on the other side of the universe absorbed in his work. Interestingly, his mom was just as intellectual as his dad, but because she still made the family the main priority, she was infinitely more relatable than the father, who was willing to always be away from the house even when he didn’t need to. Charles didn’t have any role models of guys that could be intuitive or emotional until he by synchronicity runs into a friend of his sister Meg, who randomly was headed into the old abandoned house that Charles was headed to. “Calvin dug his hands down in his pockets. ‘You’re holding out on me.’ ‘So ’re you,’ Charles Wallace said. ‘Okay, old sport,’ Calvin said, ‘I’ll tell you this much. Sometimes I get a feeling about things. You might call it a compulsion. Do you know what compulsion means?’”

Unlike the intellect that sees the physical world and the logical laws that govern it, the intuition sees value or meaning and has no words to describe it, but only feelings and symbols. It is pretty frustrating when we have a logical plan, and then feel a “compulsion” as Calvin put it, that changes the plan in a way we can’t rationalize logically. At this point, I was interested if it were accurate to what my experience has proved about how our mind’s work, it would be a story about Charles Wallace integrating his intuition, the non-verbal world of meaning and value. He meets the first lady, Mrs. Whatsit, who is eccentric and impulsive. I didn’t think much about that until they meet the next lady, Mrs. Which, who only spoke in poems and song lyrics. Then when they met the third lady who was said to be the oldest of the three, she hardly could say anything at all. “Wow!” I thought, “our journey to embrace what is compulsive, illogical, and meaningful starts looking merely eccentric and impulsive, we find the only way to somewhat express it is through songs and poems, and then at some point we stop worrying about expressing with words what has no words to describe it, we learn how to communicate through hugs, smiles, and all other non-verbal communication.

Just as Prince Charming in Sleeping Beauty was not a man or romantic interest but her intellect developing, Meg in a Wrinkle in Time was not Charles’s sister, but his intuition or Emotion developing. I don’t want to spoil the end of the movie or book, but considering that, it was so beautiful how it ended.

By happenstance, I ended up reading the book Tuck Everlasting right after watching and reading a Wrinkly in Time. This story was the opposite of a wrinkle in time. In that book Winnie Foster lives in a house with her mother and grandmother, they own a big forest, but Winnie has never explored it, she has always stayed within the fenced portion of the yard. I had no expectations for the book, I was just reading it for a girl I was dating, but then when Winnie finds a toad that comes to the fence and looks thirsty, then gives it some water, I knew immediately what it was. In the development of the brain, the difference between our brains and other animals is consistent, where the most primitive part of our brain develops fist, the brain stem, which we share in common with reptiles, and our frontal lobe develops last, which is what separates us from all other animals.

The brain stem or reptile or lizard brain is where the cranial nerve 2 attaches, which has the function of smell. Reptiles have two main functions, smell food and sex, and pursue them both. The mammalian or mid-brain is composed of the elements of emotion and all of which is necessary for the nesting instinct. The nesting instinct is a linear process, you add one twig or thread to the nest at a time. Winnie was at home doing housework for her mother and grandmother, and each chore has an expected time it will take, there is not much guessing involved, making breakfast may through some complication take an extra hour to prepare, but not an extra week.

The reptile brain is in charge of non-linear tasks or thinking, finding a mate is not as straightforward as making breakfast. In the story Winnie decides to explore the forest, only once she has decided she is fed up with being at home. Almost immediately she is kidnapped but by good people… “What? How does that work?” Suddenly she is many miles from home, fishing on a boat with a random guy, and they only catch one fish, but Winnie tells him to throw it back. Non-linear thinking is like fishing, there are good places to try, and lures to put on, and some days you catch a lot very easily, and other days you don’t catch anything—that is because you can’t know what you are going to find until you find it.

The intuition or the mammal brain is looking for “the next step,” which is not energy intensive. The intellect is looking for, “the next destination,” which could be the last place we look and requires us to be willing to search however long it takes. That is why the intellect needs the reckless libido driven lizard brain to fuel the possible long process to find the next destination. This doesn’t spoil it, because something deeper than we are conscious of the inside of us already knows it, but the end of the book Winnie is at the fence line again and there comes the toad.  A dog comes and tries to attack the toad, and she brings it on her side of the fence. It seems irrational, but it made me cry—it was so beautiful. We have these two components working independently in our mind, one thinking linearly, and the other non-linearly, and we have to protect one from the other.

Okay, so what is the first tow movies or books I read seemed to have perfect archetypal symbolism to the process of integrating our intellect and our intuition, whichever we happen to have developed first?

Well, once I saw it there, I started seeing it everywhere, and not in a conformational bias sort of way. I have realized that I wasn’t completely wrong, an author in a book might now consciously be putting in these complex juxtapositions of archetypal ideas, but that’s because the archetypal ideas go deeper than our consciousness. I am not suggesting that the symbols are universal, that every story has a reptile and a mammal somehow is perfect archetypal juxtaposition, because I haven’t read every book to see if that’s true, but I don’t think that is the part that matters. Science is the description of life as a system of logic. The archetypal journey is life as a meaningful narrative. One is not better or worse than the other, they are independent in action but depend in existence—there was never a time when the dance or wrestle they have wasn’t what was driving life forward. There hasn’t been a time when the process of finding meaning or adding meaning to logic didn’t then, in turn, facilitate more logic to be found, nor has there been a time when finding and adding logic to meaning didn’t then, in turn, facilitate more meaning to be found. 

The philosopher’s, or sorcerer’s stone, maybe only recognizable from the title of the famous Harry Potter book, but it has been an idea for millennia. The idea of the philosopher’s stone was not to alchemically change iron to gold, but that the power of thought could help us overcome death and privation. The word philosopher comes from the root “phil” which means love, and “soph,” which means thought. The word comes from the fact that certain thoughts make us happy and certain thoughts make us sad. For example, we learn something new, and the first thing we want to do is share it. We love to share ideas and stories. Just the fact that there is something inside of us that makes us want to share a story shows insight into what is more central to us than our consciousness. Even the root of sorcerer is “ser” which means to line up. That there is something that will come from lining up one thought with another. Of course, people have lined up some pretty odd ideas, but whoever the first person to line up the idea of chewing willow bark when they had a headache, might have seemed superstitious, but really had found aspirin.

So, why is it a philosopher’s stone?

The idea that we have the power to change our circumstance for the better is an idea older than paper or papyrus, it’s an idea that was first written on stone. One of the earliest recorded actions was ancient Semites who after solving a problem, stopped to inscribe on a rock what had happened so that they remembered it. It was called, a stone of remembrance, which in their language was Ebenezer. It is a fact of life that is we don’t remember past mistakes we will repeat them, and if we don’t remember past successes then we cannot build on top of them.

So, where has this Sorcerer’s stone gotten us? For cancer-fighting medication. To heart transplants. To sustaining resources to feed most of the world. We sometimes might take for granted the primitive beginnings all the knowledge we have come from. We might laugh at someone like Freud for saying everything is like is a phallus, but neglect that because of him we not only know we have an unconscious mind, but that there is something we can do about it. Because of him we have the word “transference,” which is the idea that we have no idea what our problems are, otherwise we would fix them ourselves, and so there is little direct benefit in asking someone their problems, because we all have false ideas about our problem, but that we can still find them, because they manifest in almost everything we do. Our problem is probably not that people don’t understand how much better all our ideas are, it’s probably that we are narcissistic, which a therapist or anyone else can clearly see manifest in how we interact with them.

The word Ebenezer may bring to mind Ebenezer Scrooge, which Charles Dickens aptly named his main character over three thousand years later in a much different cultural context then the word was coined… and yet somehow ends up being perfectly consistent. Scrooge is a derivative of the word scrounge which means to search stealthily, rummage or pilfer. When he was taken in a dream to see Christmases to come, it was not the actual future, but merely a logical extrapolation of what would come, uses a reference what he already knew, and borrowing or pilfering from other people’s experiences as well.

I am not saying that words have universal significance, even though there are more cases to support that idea than  mere coincidence, the important part, is that Charles Dickens character Scrooge was a very logical numbers driven sort of person, and then in a dream was confronted by his intuition which revealed to him the world of meaning, which wasn’t as illogical as he had supposed. This is the most foundational archetypal idea, that the world or meaning, and the world of logical as in wrestle which turns into a sort of intimate dance as the two fundamentally different worlds are integrated into one beautiful whole.

To simplify the archetypal ideas into two important words, they would be, assumptions and expectations. We make unconscious meaningful assumptions, which our intellect forms into expectations. So, then, what is the story deeper than consciousness? What is the archetypal journey?

Just as we often don’t recognize or appreciate as poignantly that we are healthy until we are sick, we have a hard time understanding happiness other than just the absence of sadness. When we read a book, or watch a movie, we don’t get overwhelmingly depressed or anxious when the character is faced with what seems like impossible odds, we are excited to see how they will find a way to overcome them because we somehow know they will. We are excited to see the character take the hero’s journey, and end the book or movie being a different better person. So, why don’t we meet what seem like overwhelming odds with excitement to see how we will become a changed person?

It’s because there is a formula that our thoughts are processed to, and if we are not aware of what variables we have in the equation, there is no reasonable way to expect that the answer will be good. Anytime we feel overwhelmed or disappointed, we can write out the formula and fill in the blanks as honest as possible.

“If ___ just ___, I would be happy.”

“If (that girl I’m superficially attracted to because I don’t actually know her well enough to know who she really is beyond the superficial) just (gave me the chance, and by chance, I mean was willing to completely love me back for long enough to know that I would make her happy), I would be happy.”

We often don’t realize that something like that is what is operating in our sub-conscious and that it is the failed expectation of that happening that disappoints us, and the unlikelihood of it happening that makes us overwhelmed. Well, of course, its unlikely, it is not only illogical but also immoral and meaningless. The second blank is the formula “If ___ just ___, I would be happy,” is our assumption of the key to happiness, and the first black is whose responsibility we think it is to find or use that key. This is The Story, the only story we can or want to tell, and I not being dogmatic or gimmicky to suggest that all real stories can be simplified into this formula and that the main character comes to the realization that the variables he or she has there are wrong. The bias in these variables is usually either skewed towards the world of logic and has to have the world of meaning integrated, of skewed towards the world of meaning and has to have logic integrated.

The story of life is our struggle to put our self in the first blank space, taking responsibility for our happiness, and then finding what we actually can and should put as the second variable in the second blank; it’s not as easy as it seems, because sometimes the right answer seems too easy, and other times it seems too hard.

The heroes journey as it was first outlined in Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with A Thousand Faces, he simplified in 1990 in The Hero’s Journey to two basic worlds, Starting in the world of the known, descending into the world of the unknown, and then coming back to the world of the known, now knowing and being capable of more. Campbell draws the journey as a circle bisected horizontally, and labels the line separating the top from the bottom, the threshold of adventure. The top half is labeled “order,” and the bottom is labeled, “chaos.” The bottom half is also known as “learning/growth.” The top half is also considered conscious, and the bottom unconscious, which is why in so many stories, the villain is always found after some sort of descent.

On movie, for a long time, I considered the worse movie ever, was G.I. Joe. Spoiling the movie will make no difference to anyone who hasn’t seen it, if anything it will make it better, probably still not worth watching… but anyway, what I didn’t like the most, is that the villain had this ginormous underwater based in Antarctica, with technology that could destroy the world, and yet the whole plot was to get some dumb micro-bots, which would be like a nuke that wouldn’t have the negative global consequences of blocking the sun with dust… okay, yeah, I see a slight advantage, but they had an army, and the best jets and whatever, even nukes were unnecessary. What bothered me most, was just the sheer financial cost of building the underwater base and all the tech that came with it. I know, that is a terrible reason to hate a movie, but the incredible cheesy lines didn’t help either. I also know I shouldn’t dislike the movie National Treasure just for the fact that the shadow on the wall pointing to the key would have been in a different spot at a different time of year, but I did, but don’t know.

Why is it that every house in some cities has a basement, but very few in other cities do?

Because basements are incredibly expensive, because digging gets harder the further you go, and you could get a much bigger house for the same price by building up or out rather than down. The reason everyone in some areas do, is because they have to, The foundation has to go belong the front line, and therefore if you already have to dig six feet down, you might as well dig an extra two feet down and make it a usable basement. Maybe, all writers which have ever put the villain down in some underground lair despite financial feasibility because basements and caves are creepy and because the writers had no idea of the cost because they are writers and not construction workers, but I don’t think that’s the case. It is because that is The Archetypal Story.

I think this circle could be bisected again vertically, making four quarters or stages. The first stage is discovering that the idea of the key to happiness we had filled into the second blank was wrong—this is what causes our descent into chaos and the unknown. This is Captain America at the end of his third cinematic appearance and after saving millions of lives, says when asked, that he is not sure anymore what happiness is. This is where we really start to identify the problem, usually because our gap in understanding of happiness forcedly made itself apparent.

The second stage is realizing who we assumed the responsibility for using or finding the key is debunked, because we realize our destiny is up to us—the first blank we had filled with the variable of someone else doing something for us we realize won’t work, and realize that we have to put the responsibility on ourselves, because we are the only thing we can actually change. This is where we feel the most alone, and in the furthest, darkest, most chaotic part of the unknown.

The third step of the hero’s journey is where we put as much of our full selves in a blank number one as we can, and find that as we take as full of responsibility as we can for what we have to do, that we can actually do something about our circumstance. We realize that though we may not be completely at fault for our circumstance, it doesn’t change that we are fully responsible for our attitude and actions and that it is up to us to make the best of our circumstance. This is where we find ourselves, because much of who we are, is what responsibilities we choose to take upon ourselves--this is because it shows both what we want, and what we are willing to sacrifice, even if we it is not a conscious goal.

The fourth and final step is where we come to understand the variable that goes in blank number two, stumbling into it on pure determination. It isn’t until we actually tried to completely take on the responsibility that we understand the nature of it, and this new improved understanding brings us back into the world of the known.

The fourth step led us back to where we started, but now as a changed person, with new and improved assumptions filling blanks one and two, it will lead to us seeing something about our new assumptions filling blank two that if off, and subsequently then seeing a way that we are not fully putting ourselves in blank one, we recommit and learn more, and the cycle keeps repeating.

One thing we find in stories is that all the villains have some rationale behind what they are doing. It is possible to do something good just for the sake of it, but it is not possible to do something bad just for the sake of it. One of the greatest villains is the Joker in the Dark Knight movie, but he did have a positive motive. He wanted to show people the evil they were capable of, and the chaos that was already there ready to explode. Yes, he took is way too far, but “letting sleeping dogs lay,” is not the way to the peace or happiness, because if we don’t wake them up, something else eventually will.

I am not suggesting that we be the Joker, but that when the Joker comes into our lives in whatever form it comes, that we use that thrust into chaos to challenge our assumption of what happiness is, and in what ways we can take more responsibility for it. All good stories tell us that we can take the plunge into chaos and the unknown and emerge stronger, smarter and capable of more love.

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” ―G.K. Chesterton

“Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” ― C.S. Lewis

We are narrating our life’s story, and if we are not happy, it is because we are resisting the hero’s journey. Happiness is not a right, it is a responsibility. When you find yourself disappointed or overwhelmed, write the simple formula, “If ___ just ___, I would be happy,” and what we can easily find is the expectations of the variables we have consciously operated in blank one and two, and then it is our question to find and challenge the assumptions that make those expectations.

We were born happy, and it is not because we were born naïve. We were born with the core assumption that love is always enough, and that we are always enough, and life has been trying to challenge it, and once we consider that core assumption debunked, anything that replaces it will only bring misery. Until you can find the rationale to support, I recommend just operating under the assumption that love is always enough, and that we are always enough, because it is true, whether or not we have logical or meaningful evidence yet to support it.

For more, please check out my website, ConflictandConnection.com or get a copy of my book on Amazon Conflict and Connection: Anatomy of Mind and Emotion