Narrative, Part I

May 31 2021

We live in a world of narrative. 

Ultimately, all words used in the service of narrative of one kind or another, and its influence on humanity is inescapable. Narrative is fundamentally sequential; and all of the arts, which are alternate forms of narrative, exploit this property in order to create narratives, whether verbal or nonverbal.

Yet the aim of this narrative is to explain not just the nature of narrative itself, but also its limitations. To that extent, although it’s inevitably self-referential, the narrative you’re about to read points towards a territory that comes without narrative.

When we hear the word narrative, our associative mind — which is in the business of assumptions — automatically assumes that it knows what the word means. Yet we rarely think about it. A narrative is a construction; it’s a sequence of ideas and memories cut and pasted together in order to impose an order on them, whether artificial or real. 

Of course one of the dangers lies in the fact that artificial and real narratives are difficult to distinguish from one another, a fact that has plagued mankind throughout its history and is dramatically magnified in today’s society by communications technology. Yet it’s the inner question about personal narrative that we examine here, because the function of narrative is to impose meaning of one kind or another on one’s life; and everyone has a real need for meaning of one kind or another. One of the classic symptoms of depression, emotional dysfunction, is a feeling that nothing has meaning anymore. This kind of dysfunction frequently leads to suicide; and so it is in fact life-threatening, underscoring how important an intact, comprehensible, and intelligent meaning has for us. Without a narrative, that can’t emerge.

Yet the fact that narratives may or may not be true, and have widely varying degrees of connection to reality — as well as a widely varying connection to positive emotional values such as compassion and empathy— has a huge impact on human life. They color our perception; and they color it in such a way that the color is indelible. Once one believes in the narrative, becomes convinced of its truth, that narrative affects everything that it encounters, bending the light of each and every incoming impression into its own gravity well.

In this way narratives can become, quite literally, “black holes” which suck everything around them into their event horizon. When this takes place, it’s called “insanity;”and yet perhaps the term isn’t quite correct, because what one might call it is dysfunctionally extreme sanity. That is to say, it has all the features of sanity —a healthy mental outlook, as sanus, the Latin root of the word “sane” implies. It mimics health, even though it is itself unhealthy. This reminds us, perhaps, of cancer cells, which have a certain kind of superhuman health to them which nonetheless threatens the life of the organism.

Narratives are what one might call a three-centered activity. The mind organizes them; the emotion provides them with the power and energy they need to exist; and the body gives them a place to live. So there are three types of minds involved with any narrative. Yet it’s a striking and very important fact that of these three minds, only two of them truly have the power to create and sustain narrative, and those two are the intellect and the emotions. The intellectual mind is the creative force which organizes narratives around words and feelings; and feeling, being the locus of force for narrative, is the sustaining power of narrative itself. Without emotional force, narratives quickly run out of steam and collapse.

Only the body, as the receiver and residential locus of narrative, does not participate in these architectural and motive activities. The body, quite simply put, is not capable of constructing narrative. It isn’t built that way. It’s the house that narrative lives in, not the narrative itself.

This becomes quite useful, because the body has a certain kind of objectivity in it as a result of this situation. The body-consciousness is a house: we reside within the body-consciousness.

Being a resident of the body consciousness is to be a resident of the part that receives the harmonic presence of the other. It also receives the harmonic presence of physical things. In both cases here, by harmonic presence I mean the vibration, the molecular cloud of energy, of objects, events, circumstances, conditions and — most importantly — people.

While narrative is built from conflict and resolution, the body simply receives. There’s contradiction in feeling and in thought; this is a daily thing, a routine observation. Anyone who spends even a moment observing himself will notice this quite early on. Within narrative, we live in a world of contradiction. Contradiction means, quite literally, “spoken against;” it goes against the word, against the narrative. The very word itself points out that narrative is a competitive activity, unveiling its roots within not just our being but also the ego. Narrative has to discriminate, to sort out facts and fiction one from the other. It also has the capacity to blend fact and fiction, one of its chief features. Subjectivity blends fiction into narrative seamlessly.

The body doesn’t do any of this. It exists, as it were, outside the narrative. It’s just the place where the narrative is constructed: the real estate, not the mansion. Furthermore, the narrative itself isn’t us. We’re the narrators; yet we believe, unless we’re meticulously mindful, that we are what we narrate. Identity politics is all about this. Yet while we wail and moan about identity politics and their negative effect on the world, we fail to see that our inner life is likewise constructed from identity politics. As Swedenborg pointed out, we are what we love; and above all most of us love ourselves first before anything else. Even if we hate ourselves, it’s merely an inverted form of egoism that makes us special because we are bad instead of good.

The body consciousness doesn’t make any of these mistakes. It’s a whole mind unto itself which knows, in a simple and functional way, precisely what it is. It receives life without a narrative.

This is an enormously helpful part of ourselves, because it’s possible to help us separate narrator-self from narrative-self by investing in the awareness of the body. This is where a new understanding of organic sensation becomes invaluable. Organic sensation, once it arises and becomes permanent within Being, helps to dissipate the illusory nature of narrative. It saps it of power, because it provides a rooted force that exists before narrative enters. 

Narrative can, in the objective sense, be measured against this rooted force; and the moment that narrative is measured, we can refer to it as an act of questioning. We don’t say to ourselves “my narrative is true;” we say, “is my narrative true?” 

Note that these are exactly the same four words, yet their action upon us is entirely different. One of them leads us down the road into delusion unless we’re absolute experts at the construction of narrative — and almost none of us are. The other one leads us down a road where we examine our narratives much more carefully. This is by far the preferable road; and yet the fork occurs in sensation, a place that almost no one lives in.

This is why the recovery of the body consciousness and a re–centering of our being within it is so important. The health of our being and our agency depends on this action, because if we don’t begin there, no matter what we do, we have no reasonable degree of separation from narrative. We’re unable to measure it at all from inside its perimeters. 

Because the body-consciousness exists outside its perimeter, it can always measure it.

Narratives, in mankind, are a form of worship. Worship, in its root meaning, is a form of worthiness or valuation. We invest most of our perceived value in our narratives; it’s why they seize men and cause them to do objectively insane things such as fight wars. War itself is in fact an outgrowth of narrative. And this brings the question of narrative and scale into play.

Be well today.

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.