Every world religion and spiritual practice unite in The Storytelling System. Medical research has accomplished this, not a mystic, prophet, or poet. It’s fascinating to behold how well it has come together. It is time to turn swords into ploughshares. Science has proven that God is Nature. We can now open our Holy Books without fear of being found lacking. Sin is intellect without imagination. Original sin is having a body that asserts its separateness and isolation until its owner turns inward and discovers they have a whole, rich story that weaves and reweaves every few minutes. Detachment isn’t no feeling, but it is feeling awe all the time.

As the texts teach us universally, when we live with story we inhabit an entirely different world. Heaven, a world above this one, Sky, Ground, Depth are names for it. There are many. Living with story is the opposite of empiricism. There’s no measuring, and there’s no clear solution. There’s just wonder, humor, beauty, and surprise. This is not dissociation. It’s our biology. We have access to magic through a body part. If that’s not the stuff of stories, friend, I don’t know what is.

Living with story, as opposed to living with thinking (ugh!) means waking up without worry or stress no matter what is going on in the world. For those early minutes of the day, be happy, calm, and delighted by the way sunlight plays through a curtain. Hear the bird in the hemlock outside your window? How many dogs are on your bed? Cats? Don’t look at your phone. Wait an hour or two. Everything can wait. This is your morning. Enjoy it. See the difference? A morning is the start of a story. By the end of the day, if you have maintained this posture of being, you will have had some serious wonder, and you will want to wake up tomorrow in a whole new story.

Believe me, I know this sounds like any set of symptoms and polysyllabic words in a psychiaitry book. You know those books were written for people denied storytelling and imagination, though. Now that imagination is a body part, it’s time to discover its ways. You’ll see very quickly why all the books speak of reality’s being an illusion. The more deeply we venture into a creativity, the more clearly we see into the structure of this illusion. Venture in farther, and you may even find yourself altering the illusion. This is not exaggeration but a timeless observation of the nature of Nature. We’re a part of it not separate. As such, what we are it is. Be ready to be delighted.

Living in story means letting go of your bad mood. It means no longer feeling like you’re more grown up than someone who is happy being creative. It means calling out people who are all gruff and Super Important and asking them to get right with their story. Tell them time’s up on sourpussing and commandeering. There’s nothing to be sour about, and there’s really nothing to commandeer. The earth is dancing so dance.

When everyone lives in the story, all the old books speak of renewal. To be a “fisher of men” and a shepherd of sheep is to be a listener of stories. In listening, we are living in story in its most profound form. We are allowing another person to make the invisible visible, that which is inside now out in the open. From an five-sense material perspective, this sounds like listening to radio. We’are in a five-sense world if we are living in story, though. We are inside each other, and everything is supporting this sharing. It is sacred in Matthew 18:20:

“Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.”

Christ is Storytelling, but this is not in any way a minimization of either Christ or Storytelling. Remember that the evidence of Narrative Medicine and Expressive Writing does not come with an answer to “but how?” We are beyond science’s measurements in The Storyteller System. Do not think for a moment that in this part of ourselves there is only silence. This is a level of consciousness we all belong in. We feel it when we are in community, engaging in song and story, and oh yes let someone share a poem. We enter joy and trust. We feel forgiven because we have told our story and the world did not fall apart. We might have fallen apart in relief of getting our pain out, but it passes, and we walk with a lighter step. Christ consciousness is story consciousness.

Also, call it paradise and nirvana. Pull out all the names for the states of being and blesses attributed to sacrality. Have all of them. Breathe them in and out. We can breathe now. There’s nothing to fear, and there’s no one to hate. This is the oneness, and we only had to meet ourselves in community through the act of telling stories–funny ones, sad ones. Once we begin, the story thread of our lives flows from our lips. We see our story self taking form inside us, a second you, a long lost shadow or ghost. More stories bring more detail to this being. Then the natural and material world begin to aid and guide us. Incidents in the daily world nourish our vision of who we are much more than they irritate or stress us out. Quite soon, we prioritize this understanding and the curiosity that illuminates it. This is how we are born again. We create the self that feels less or no pain, carries less or no burden of shame and guilt, and lives happier than we thought possible. Imagine: happiness then story by story create it.

Living in story, as the texts say, is truly living. It’s knowing that everything is a story. As things in your day come toward us, it’s knowing we can handle it. We know that stories have good parts and scary parts. All of them. Living in story means recognizing and being present with both. There is no Yelp review option for life. Also, the day-to-day stuff can be worked using imagination. That’s all I’m going to say about that last sentence. When I asked my Irish grandmother about a particular supernatural figure iin folklore, she said, “I think if you have to ask me about them you know enough about them, and that’s all I’m going to tell you.” Maybe that explains what people who talk about story do not talk with story. Living in story is engaging life at every level. Our stories train us to be who we really are. The language they speak is inside us. We learn it by telling.