Story and Belief

Copyright © 2014 Dr. Karen Thurecht PhD.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-2591-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2592-1 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 10/01/2014

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Our Science Stories

Our Religious Stories

Stories About Health

Going Beyond The Stories

Using The Tarot For Unlocking Our Stories

Transition

References

FOREWORD

D uring the eighties, I spent a lot of time travelling through Papua New Guinea visiting the Highlands of Mt. Hagan, the lake country around Wewak and Maprik as well as the tropical islands of sparkling Madang Harbor. I lived with the people in huts made from bamboo and coconut leaves, slept with chickens and pigs, and feasted on foods that grew in the village and was cooked on open fires. There was no running water, we drank from underground springs and bathed in rock pools or in the sea. It struck me how happy they were, these people who invited me into their homes. Of course, there were times when there was upset in the villages, even violence, but soon people returned to a state of general happiness: an essential joy was derived from simply being alive.

I have also spent a good portion of the last two decades travelling the remote areas of Australia, living, and working with Australian Aboriginal communities. Many of the Aboriginal people I have known have suffered unfathomable tragedy in their lives, as well as carrying an extraordinary burden of ancestral grief. Yet they have also proven to be the most resilient people I have ever known. I am constantly caught off guard by their ability to laugh in the face of life’s challenges. Even while there is a layer of hopelessness that sometimes rests like a cloud over the communities, just beneath the surface there is a cheekiness, a humor that cuts through the truth like a knife, self deprecating and honest.

I have spent many years thinking about what it is that allows people with so little access to life’s comforts; to sustain happiness so much more easily than us in the Western industrialized cultures. I wonder how people who endure an intensity of grief and loss that would send most mainstream Australians insane, manage to maintain that musical infectious laughter at the world and the circumstances it throws up. Each time that I return to my own culture, after periods living in remote areas, I find that the difference is palpable. It seems that there is a fundamental sense of dissatisfaction, of something missing in our society. The things that we value and worry about come as a shock at first. It takes awhile to settle in and realize that at home, these things matter.

As an Anthropologist I want to know why we as a culture in the West, with all our access to material goods, technology and science, are so fundamentally unhappy? Why is it that between the dizzy highs and desolate lows of life, we experience a sense of emptiness? I am not thinking about the kind of happiness that comes from acquiring a new car or some amazing shoes, or even the kind of happiness that accompanies a new love affair. These things can make us feel wonderful, however the feeling goes away after awhile. We see another car we like, or someone else has nicer shoes, or the person we are in love with disappoints us, and we feel miserable again. We seem to always want more.

These wonderful feelings are worth experiencing for sure, but they are fleeting, they cannot be sustained all the time. What I am wondering about is a continuous calm, essential experience of contentment, present even in times of extreme stress or disappointment. So, when we feel our excitement go through the roof, we can enjoy this sensation while still knowing in our hearts, that when we come down from the dizzy heights, we will feel calmly content, not devastated. When something terrible happens and we feel miserable, we know that this is in fact temporary and we will soon return to feeling content.

It is important to enjoy the highs, and experience the lows of life. It seems to me however; that these are the intriguing and interesting qualities that interlude within a much quieter symphony. For many people in our contemporary Western World, there is a pendulum that swings back and forth from heady heights to unfathomable lows with no space in between. This is exhausting, as will be attested by the majority of people who live life this way. Some people experience a kind of emptiness between the highs and lows: a sense that life really doesn’t have much purpose. This is where we need happiness to settle; a contentment that is enduring and lies between the highs and lows.

This contentment is for some; a deep sense of satisfaction in being alive that resonates through the body and can be felt in every cell. Some Indigenous people describe this sensation as being derived from their cultural identity. Some describe it as derived from strong spiritual links while others have a more secular explanation that refers to a kind of relatedness, or connectivity with their people and with their environment. Whatever it is, I have often felt it is missing in my own culture.

Clearly, I am not alone. Judging by the plethora of self-help books that hit the best-seller lists, it is clear that we feel we are missing something. Many, many authors refer to a pervasive discontent that underlies our modern lifestyle. We are yearning for meaning and purpose, and the frustration we experience is this yearning unfulfilled. This is interpreted in our own bodies in the form of discontent and anxiety. Increasingly, science is revealing what many knew all along; that this embodied anxiety and discontent has a significant impact on our health.

We can follow many paths to search for meaning and all paths are valid. In this book I explore the notion that it is story that provides our existence with meaning. I argue that our cultural stories provide the framework within which we create our individual personal stories, and the interplay between the personal and the cultural is what gives us our sense of meaning and purpose. Discontent is the direct result of our loss of the sense of story, the importance of story, and the loss of our ability to understand how it is that story works. I talk about loss, because I believe that at some point in the past we had a strong grasp of the importance of story to our health and happiness. Indigenous cultures all over the world retain this understanding of the value of story, while for the most part, in the industrialized West, it has been forgotten.

While it is in the stories that we create, that we find happiness or sustain pain; it is always easier to understand something intellectually, than it is to live it out. The ideas in this book are a testament to this fact. As I write; I grapple with the theories and concepts and try to find ways to articulate them so that the reader can grasp my meaning. At the same time; I struggle within my own life, on a day-to-day basis, to live out the concepts I believe in, and write about. It is difficult, and I think it is important, that this difficulty be acknowledged. As is explained in A Course in Miracles, understanding something intellectually, is not the same as knowing it. We need to experience changes in our perception before we can know that perception really is all there is. This book contains a reflective account of my own changing perceptions, and the struggle contained within those changes. I hope this honest reflection gives hope to others.

The nineteen eighties represented a golden era for the philosophy of postmodernism and I was in love with it. As an undergraduate I loved my chosen discipline of anthropology, loved learning about cultures, loved the romanticism of participant observation, and loved my teachers, most of whom were men with long loose hair in pony tails and who lectured in bare feet. At the same time I was horrified by some of the activities carried out by anthropologists in the short history of the discipline. Postmodernism provided the solution to my dilemma. The history of anthropology was played out within the project of colonization for sure – but it was a new era. I would be a postmodern anthropologist! A different species altogether, and one perfectly capable of casting the observer’s gaze back on my own culture. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was just as much an artifact of colonization as any time I spent in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Thus began my thirty-year academic relationship with postmodernism.

This connection is important to understanding my writing because it is through this philosophy and approach of postmodernism that the different aspects of this book come together. Recently, within the intellectual world, there has been a radical change in thinking. It is a change that is pervasive across all boundaries of thought. The postmodern era represents a period in which reason is swept aside as the single crucible of truth and notions of truth become irrelevant. Postmodernists claim that it is meaningless to argue either for or against truth, because the notion of a single truth is a product itself of modernist thinking.

During the period beginning in seventeenth century Europe, philosophers made radical changes in the world-view of Western civilizations when they replaced beliefs in mysticism with the belief in reason. The physical environment was defined in terms of what could be observed. Ideas were tested and trialed through experimentation and observation and knowledge evolved systematically as each new batch of intellectuals furthered the work of those who came before them. The ideal of reason has proved to be a powerful model that has resulted in great advances in technology and medical science. Yet postmodernists argue that these advances have come with some serious losses. Postmodernism makes a comprehensive attack on reason and the notion of a single truth, however it does much more than this.

Postmodernism is fundamentally a political standpoint. Modernists believe that reason enables us to see and understand the world as it is, without emotion and without political bias. Postmodernists argue that the only way we perceive our world is through emotion and that everything is political. According to the postmodernists, ways of knowing are politically loaded, and claims of objectivity and rationality are used to mask political agendas. This standpoint is relevant to every point made in this book because the argument put forward is that the world we perceive is one made entirely of our own stories. When stories clash, there is a negotiation around which story will be accepted as real, for practical purposes. This negotiation takes place in a world in which power is not distributed evenly and the way beyond this differential is through the relinquishing of Ego, and therefore of power.

Language is at the center of the postmodern epistemology. The question is one of how consciousness is connected to reality through language. For modernists, the primary purpose of consciousness is to be aware of reality, and language is the tool we use to describe and share this awareness. For postmodernists, language connects only with language. Language has nothing to do with cognition because it does not connect with reality. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false. A person’s beliefs are in themselves socio-linguistic constructions. If we peel away one set of words, we reach another set. There is no way for us to articulate our experience of the world without the use of language, and the labels we use in language are already constructed from pre-conceived ideas. We use language because it is functional, not because it represents reality. The reason why this is so important to understand is because it feeds directly into the creation of our stories. We use language to create and share stories that are persuasive. With this, we are persuading ourselves, and others, of the validity of our stories. There is nothing wrong with this unless we are unwilling to see it for what it is and mistake our stories for a single reality.

This book then is essentially a postmodernist project. It is unpacking and repacking the cultural stories that frame our personal stories. It argues that there is no truth; there is only perception. Our perceptions, collectively and individually, create the world we experience. It is political in that an eclectic range of cultural influences on Western thought is included, however the modernist notion of reason, and the existence of a singular truth, is rejected. Our world, as we experience it, is a complex interplay of stories within stories. As our experience becomes more global