They say that to understand a people, you need to know their creation story. Ours is simple: we are the creations of the Great Storyteller, who set things in motion at the beginning of time. Since then, we have been wandering the Universe, telling each other stories and enacting them. Unfortunately, many of us have forgotten who we are and where we came from, and have come to believe our own stories as the truth.
The result, at most times in history and most evidently today, is utter chaos. Humans have created organizations, including governments, giving them vast powers over other human beings. One man can send a generation of young men to war because they believe in a story that the other side intends to wage war on them. And perhaps that story is even “true,” in that the other side imagines the opposite.
It’s hard to imagine anything more important than war, but wars go on in particular places, and the rest of the planet is an equal if less overtly violent threat. Does it matter if humans are wiped out by natural disasters rather than by killing each other? And of course, it’s not just humans but much of the environment as well that is decimated. So what are we to make of this?
What we forgot was that when the Great Storyteller created us, he warned us of this tragic outcome. He told us that if we came to believe too strongly in our own stories, we would likely destroy ourselves. But this was the price of freedom; each of us is at liberty to do the cruelest and most evil things, just as we are to do the most extraordinary things. Imagine a world in which we choose not to do the worst because we are free to do so. This is the story that the Great Storyteller has gifted us.
For what is a story but a gift, anyway?
The issue today is that the stories that are being told are mostly the wrong ones, while the right ones are those whose voices are barely heard. There must emerge from among us a hero, a man or a woman whose voice is so strong that it carries over the land. Or perhaps many such voices. Voices that say that the stories we tell can either imprison us or set us free.
The Cherokee story goes that one day a grandfather was telling his grandson of the battle that goes on inside all of us, a battle between two wolves.
“One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”
Of course, it is the wolf we feed our attention to that will win. That’s in the nature of storytelling. So it must be a part of the story. But it’s not the whole story. Life is, at one level, a struggle between good and evil, between darkness and light, but it’s also a triumphant and heroic story of our overcoming of evil and the triumph of good.
It’s not the eradication of evil, but our victory over it that makes us who we are.
We must therefore return to the primordial story of our beginning, to realize and appreciate that our existence in this Universe is a gift of the Great Story. The Great Storyteller is in all of us; it actually is us. The question is, which story will we tell?
Here’s one. The Universe began a long time ago. It was ten billion years before our solar system came into being. We’re a pretty small system as these things go and a relatively new one. We’re extremely fortunate that one of our planets is in the Goldilocks zone, not too warm and not too cold, but just right for the emergence of life. As we are now beginning to learn, there are many other solar systems, but we don’t yet know whether there are others that also support life. We can imagine that there are many systems where none of the planets is in quite the right orbit so that water — which is plentiful in the universe — could exist in all of its states, and could provide the medium for life to arise. Just exactly how it did occur is still unclear, but it appears that its emergence is a wholly natural phenomenon, arising from the elements present on the planet spontaneously joining together into organic molecules, and these in turn into single-celled creatures and then multicellular life.