Reply to comment

The more I have thought about the nature of the storytellerthe more interested I get in the question of consciousness.

 During class wepointed out the many ways in which the story teller is simply responding to theunconscious.  It would seem that often,the story teller is really just putting rational “lipstick” on the unconscious “pig”.

Which is to say the story teller is making stuff up to helpgive some plausible explanation for what the unconscious is reporting.

I would argue (borrowing liberally and loosely from Buddhistthought) that in fact, MOST of what the story teller does is habitual and reflexive.

We pick up stories from our society, parents andtelevision.  We  learn certain stories at a very young age andnever question them. We make up other stories to explain away pain and hurt.

These stories do need to be rational in any sense of theword. They do not need to account for all of the evidence. They just have to beuseful on some level.

What’s more, the big foundational stories that we tellourselves give birth to millions of little stories and story snippets.  Anybody who has meditated knows this on anintimate level.  Its extremely difficultto get the mind to stop telling stories. Sometimes these stories take the shape of elaborate fantasies andfairytales. Sometimes the mind just cranks out disjointed thought afterdisjointed thought. 

Is that consciousness? 

I would argue, that in some ways the story teller can almostreside at least partially in unconscious mind. Maybe we can think of the storytelleras an iceberg with 90% of the story residing under the surface and only 10%poking out in our awareness. 

In meditation, we slow our minds down enough – not to stopthought – which is all but impossible (at least at first) but to becomedis-identified with thought.

We learn to observe the stories that our mind is creating ina moment to moment basis, without getting lost in the stories.  This practice is done not to get rid ofstorytelling, but to develop a very different relationship with storytelling.  As people learn to not identify or get lostin the stories that they tell themselves, they find more freedom to react  to experiences in different ways. They findthat they become more aware of the relationship between their unconscious mind andtheir conscious mind. 

Per my previous conversation with Paul /exchange/bbi08/session19#comment-69558

- I am not sure whetherwe need to talk about another function of mind beyond the unconscious, thestory teller and the I-function.  But Ido think that it is important to think about the role that the story teller hasin our lives and how we can learn to control our story teller instead of beingcontrolled by our story teller.