Thread by @LetsGoCNote

I've been thinking so much about stories and myth.

We interpret so much of our reality through myth and our imaginations guide so much of our reality.

Spiral Dynamics can be used to illustrate this so well.

1-Biege is an open canvas ready to receive whatever story is to come.

Babies' minds are ready to receive language teachings, completely dependant on the immediate environment and no sense of what's coming. A blank page of new life.

2-Purple establishes stories and myth to protect from the unknown, which is virtually everything.

The world is massive and terrifying. I have no choice but to respect elders and gods to get what I need to survive. Dance, sacrifice, rights of passage, whatever it takes.

3-Red brings in new powerful stories and gods that cover honor and revenge.

The most powerful physically and influentially create the stories that further enable taking what they want. I earned this and it's my divine privilege.

4-Blue takes the grandest myth literally and turns collective story-driven determinations of good and evil into an organizing principle.

Guilt runs the show with indirect community influence of the grand myth amongst each other via doctrine. This is the way.

Those most similar to the originators of this myth tend to get the most clout and influence in society and/or have an easier time navigating the social structure.

This is an ethnocentric worldview, a myth typically built around a divine blessing of particular people.

5-Orange is a type of parsing that myth to separate it from personal discovery and experience.

The story says one thing but I experience another. Trying to see material for what it is outside of myth. This is how my experience and the myths differ. Experimenting with reality.

This does not mean being antithetical to religion or story but sometimes there are wounds to explore and contrast illuminates some unfairness of those stories, to put it lightly. America has been struggling with illuminations around its story and trying not to throw it all out.

6-Green is a time to read myths as intended, as poetry.

Each myth from around the world has origin stories, interpretations, common themes amongst human needs and development. Stories served a purpose and are further lessons to take in outside of physical or material discovery.

Rituals connected to stories are parsed and used for cognitive, emotional and spiritual healing. A focus tends to be on mind-body activation and internal connections to divinity.

7-Yellow can more readily navigate the world knowing the complex systems that myths have created in various people amongst the first tier.

Myths no longer carry socially imposing weight on this person and they traverse the earth to connect myth to the material.

Some 7-yellow teachers focus on the etiology of sounds and words to create connections between body-mind-spirit, sensory experiences, and environmental influence of story then revealing how that impacts our lives in nuance.

8-Turquoise understands the weight and power of story as a global influencing power.

There is an ability to influence systems of people and carefully selects its influence on the world's stories for generation spanning human and eco-development.

9-Coral, I can only imagine, is someone who can take it upon themselves to directly influence a worldwide scale of events through creation of stories or a story so powerful that they motivate, empower, reshape, or course correct a population move away from global tragedy.

Those last few are more speculative as I've never personally experienced those and have only seen few examples plus what I've read and heard about these second tier worldviews.

But it's pretty clear how massive and influential stories are, not just at scale, but personally.

These stories tend to include a God or gods but I don't know that God is needed for human development individually.

I grew up atheist by my own choice and I feel I've learned plenty of lessons through story and art that a religion may have organized for me.

Religion creates an overarching story that large groups can agree upon to fit into society's rules and become a bit more tame to create order.

Games, books, movies, etc. can have secular organizing influence. A more difficult route but not impossible.

Like I said with 4-blue, there's a taking of these stories literally which creates the fear and guilt.

This can include the hypothesis that comes from science taken as deterministic fact for anyone taking an atheist route like I did.

I did this regularly by only seeing science as truth, not trusting or believing anyone religious as being sane, seeing things like global warming as inevitable, and anything that backs those up are also true. But I learned that science never needed me to believe in it or not.

And conversely I'd get into fights with someone else pointing to the bible as facts. Either side seeing the other as making up their own facts unable to see one's own bias.

But I can see how it's harder to see secular usage of facts as story. It's in the way its used, mostly.

There's a certainty, an unwavering, fear-driven, guilt and shame focused, arguing to defend the belief in these facts, and largely defending the principle of science altogether. I get it. I did it.

This, to me, highlights the importance of music, film, art, and entertainment that reflects stories which can't be taken so literally.

Preaching science or politics in a movie or song comes off like Christian Rock or Film. It becomes conversion-driven instead of storytelling.

We're telling stories all the time.

Because we know storytelling is powerful. Everyday conversation stories can be lazy, the best stories require some digging to get the meat out of then.

Art and stories don't do the work for us, even though there is very much work put into creating them.

The story captures attention, the rest is on us.

Any myth that tells you exactly what to think or say becomes dangerous. That's when you get into cult territory.

There will be limits of what you can or cannot explore within given worldviews, communities, and systems.

You either reach the limit, rebel and learn on your own anyway like I did, or transfer systems and try again.

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