I wrote an essay summarizing and fleshing out the ideas I had been trying to articulate to this point in the blog, but realized that while the ideas were solid, their articulation was a little difficult to follow. That can partly be attributed to the one-take style that I write these essays in. In any case, I felt that a summary essay at this juncture was foundational to understanding what I wrote afterward, and therefore I thought a more organized version would serve this purpose better. That is the hope, we will see if I can accomplish it.
Let’s start with the main concept I have been attempting to articulate so far, which is the power of narration. The idea is that people create internal narratives of their own lives, like personal histories, made up of all the events of their life. Just as when writing real history, when we create our internal narratives there are the objective events and then the meaning or spin that we place on those objective events. In this way, it is as if the events and moments of our lives are like bins of different shapes and sizes into which we pour meaning. And, it is only after we have poured meaning into the event that it becomes fully defined and given its place in our internal narrative. This running story that we create for ourselves is what we look to in order to understand who we are presently and how we became that person. Therefore, our self-understanding, who we think we are, is affected by meaning we attribute to the events in our life. The same events, the same life, do not have a mechanistic output of the same self-identity, but can vary greatly depending on how the individual moments of that life are understood. Furthermore, just as with a real story, the singular events also make up strings of broader meaning, broader plot arc that are more entrenched and ingrained into the fabric of the story. When a history is written, how the facts are strung together is just as important as the facts themselves sometimes. The themes that are highlighted come to define the history itself. My claim is that the same can be said for internal narratives. How we connect the meaning we have attributed to singular events into broader meaning for our life story comes to define us.
The core insight I found by exploring this concept was that I felt that I, and most people, were relatively passive participants in this process of internal narrative creation. Yet, if we chose to be, we could become active participants. In fact, it was important that we became active because the stakes in this process were very high. If we allowed our subconscious to create our internal narrative, to attribute meaning to the events of our lives and to create the broader themes of our life story, we were then allowing our subconscious to dictate to us how we understood ourselves, and how we understood future events. In essence, we allow our subconscious to create our identity. Yet, if we took conscious control over the way we attribute meaning to the events in our lives, we would actually be taking conscious control over the creation of our identity. We could use this process, internal narrative creation, to create the identity and life story that we wanted to have even if we couldn’t control the objective events themselves. That insight was very powerful to me, because it gave a worthy purpose to every moment of life, gave life an intrinsic meaning, and gave me a goal that was entirely within my power to achieve.
From here, I decided to dig deeper into the implications of the concept, and my original attempt became very abstract and difficult to follow. However, I think the logic is actually relatively straightforward, and the insights worth the trouble, so I will try to lay it out more coherently here. What I did was break down the power of narration into two parts. At the first level, there is what I call perception, which for my purposes is the process through which we understand moments. I build on the logic of the more general definition of perception, which is understood as the mechanism through which we take what is external to us and internalize it. The colors we see, the air we feel, and all the other sensory data we come in contact with is not something objective, it is our mental representation of something objective (skepticism of objective reality aside).
The same can be said for the external events which happen to us as individuals. What we internalize from the event is not the objective entirety of the event but a mental representation we attribute to that event. So, the common definition of perception tells us that perception is a mechanism unique to every individual, and how we perceive our physical world is unique to every individual. Our mind attributes meaning, and categories, and so on, and in this sense we define our external world through the process of perception, and in this sense we all live in our own version of the physical world because we all understand it slightly differently through our various lenses of perception. For my purposes, the logic of perceiving the physical world extends to how we perceive individual moments and events: we define them through the process of perceiving them.
I continued to expand upon the implications of this idea by trying to incorporate the human tendency toward relational meaning. How do we understand who and what we are as individuals? I think that we understand ourselves in relation to that which is not ourselves. How we understand things external to us also defines how we understand our own identity, because it shapes the way in which we fit into the broader world as we understand it. So if perception defines our external reality, then it also defines our internal reality, it defines our own self-understanding. It defines our identity. If we think about it, the only reality that we know is the reality we perceive. By defining reality, in a way, perception is actually creating reality. Based on how we understand ourselves, we can also say that perception is creating our identity transitively by creating our understanding of what happens to us. Because our identity is the essence of who we are, we can say that perception creates both us as individuals and the world we live in. What I have done here, really, is just a logical foundation for the concept that our internal narrative shapes our identity, which I think you will see as I flesh out the second part of the power of narrative. But for now, it is important to note that this is where the concept of self-creation comes from.
As I mentioned, I use perception as the definition of the first of a two-part process that makes up the power of narrative. Perception is how we understand each singular moment and event in our lives, how we define it and pour meaning into it. Therefore, perception can be seen as the creator of our reality and identity at any given moment. To connect all of these realities and identities into something which is whole, if fluid, we create narrative. We understand each perceived moment in relation to previous perceived moments, and the process of narrative is how we organize and create this relational meaning. Our internal narrative is the story that we create from moments of perception, with all the themes and broad arcs of meaning that we create from the smaller units of meaning that singular events and moments represent.
Narrative
The process of narrative, then, is the creator of our broader reality and identity. Narrative brings all the disparate identities we have assumed over the years and realities we have lived in and makes them into something whole and continuous. It is how our identity of today, though it may be different, is still essentially the same individual as our identity tomorrow. It is how the reality we live in today, though it may be different, is still essentially the same reality of tomorrow. Without narrative we would fall apart: narrative is the creator of our eternal soul, or long lasting soul, or through-line of identity, or whatever your beliefs dictate. As I mention in “Framing My Story”, the process of narration does not have the power to create anything, it must begin with the materials it is given: our moments of perception. In this, its relation to perception is the same as the relation of perception to reality. In fact, one could say that narrative is to perception what perception is to reality: narrative is the perception of perception. As I mentioned, the logic is a little bit abstract, but I build on the terminology that the logic provides, so I think that it is worthwhile. What this mental exercise boils down to is that the nature of how we experience reality gives us control over the reality we live in, and the person we are within that reality.
So, we have this process of narrative influencing perception, which influences our identity and our reality. This process creates meaning, but my argument is that this process is done subconsciously. We take it as a given that how we understand ourselves and our world is a natural extension of the experiences we have had. WE allow our subconscious to dictate to ourselves who we believe we are. My idea was that we could take conscious control over the authorship of our internal narrative, and therefore conscious control over our creation of identity, our creation of self. We have the capacity for active self-definition. I happened upon a concept that seemed to give a visual representation of what I was talking about, and made it easier for me to understand, but it is really just an extension of the idea of moving from the subconscious to the conscious.
If you recall the movie “Inception,” they use an image to explain the creation of dreams:
Yet, rather than an outside party, I proposed that we individually could take conscious control over the process of narrative creation, the process of attributing meaning, and thereby consciously take part in the entire circle. So on the one hand, we would be creating our reality, and actively creating ourselves, while on the other we would be actively living in world and being the person we create. If we are consciously involved in both sides of the process, we truly become both the Creator and created at the same time. We are both creating who we are and the world we live in, and we are being that person and living in that world at the same time. As I mentioned, this visual is helpful to me, but really I am just talking about taking a subconscious process into the conscious realm, and taking a more active rather than passive role. But, it is from this visual that I get the concept of the simultaneous duality of being the created and Creator.
Gods as a Metaphor
I feel like the parallels between the traits of God demanded by logic and the traits I argue that we have as individuals are relatively apparent. If we become active self-definers, and gain control over our creation of narrative, are we not conceptually Gods? Have we not gained the ultimate paradoxical power? Do we not, through the control of narrative, control perception, and therefore create the reality and world we live in by defining it and giving it meaning? Obviously we do not meet all the criteria for a theological deity, but I do not know what else to call a being with the paradoxical power to self-create other than a God. There are limits to our powers of self-creation, we do not create the materials which we define and attribute meaning, but the possibilities of what can be built with those materials are as infinite as our imagination.
I have also pointed out that our powers of creation are limited to ourselves, they are self-contained. Meaning that if you try to create an identity or reality for another individual, even if you succeed through the persuasiveness of your story-telling, even if your story is so strong that others abandon their own narrative and succumb to yours, you are no longer engaged in creation. You are engaged in the destruction of the reality and identity of anther God, you become a destroyer of God’s work (metaphorically, of course). The metaphor of Gods is a powerful way to understand and respect each other’s individuality, but I think that message rings true even if you wish to move away from the idea of Gods. But because we all have this potential for self-creation, we are all Gods, so we are all equal. To take over the process of creation for someone else is to refuse to acknowledge their equality. Everyone’s unique gift for creation must be nurtured, regardless of how you choose to conceptualize and describe that gift in words. The only way that our power of creation can be expanded beyond ourselves is to collaborate. Join our processes of self-creation, join our narratives together to create a larger story of beauty.
I hope this essay clearly shows how I arrived at the terminology and concepts that I build upon in future essays, and makes their meaning simple and understandable. The power of narrative, conscious self-definition, the God within ourselves and others, all these ideas originate from the power of choice. My argument is that there is an area of choice, an area of free will, that we have not been exercising. We have allowed our subconscious to dictate to us certain things that we do not have to accept unequivocally. How we attribute meaning is a choice, and we should reflect on how we have attributed meaning in the past to ensure that we have done so in a healthy and positive manner. And more importantly, we should exercise this power of choice in the future so that we are constantly attributing the most positive meaning to the moments in our lives as we live them.
