Story-based healthcare such as Narrative Medicine, Expressive Writing, and Poetic Medicine share one source, the wellspring of creativity. This source gets covered and uncovered through history. Oral history maintained it for millennia. Stories migrated and shared elements. Intense hyperbole, surprising metaphors, and mind-blowing images conveyed best practices for receiving story’s medicine such as Ten Commandments.

The cultural image of Charlton Heston all blustery gray demonstrates the outrageous of these creative writings detailing the nature of fermentation of the self into soul. Conceiving a symbolic character who can endure 20 or 30 thousand years (if we’re allowing for oral history, as we well need to do) is the mark of an adept. Add a Red Sea! Add a staff! Now put him on a mountain! Now have him receive gigantic stone tablets from above that tell humans how to maintain omnidirectional homeostasis upon and with the earth!

Reflection and insight form the pathway of self-development. Both involve looking inward. In the practice of Natural Philosophy, the phrase “Opus Contra Natura,” the work against the surface appearance of nature. Natura can translate to both nature and organs of the body, by the way, another glance into the mind of the alchemists where double, triple, quadruple entendres flare neurons like they were rocket boosters. If you have ever been drawn into a novel, spellbound so intensely that you resented anyone who interrupted and snapped you back into the day-to-day world, this is that.

A Natural Philosopher who signed his alias “Arnoldus” writes, “Approach the work with the Intensity of labor, but first exercise in thyself a diuturnity of Intense Imagination.” Intense imagination is the Natural Philosopher’s secret fire. We stoke the flames with our creativity. The more intense the fire, the deeper into the soul of the world you venture, discovering meanings of personal experiences at the start and proceeding along the continuum of seen and unseen worlds into full interpenetration. Figurative speech fuels flight toward the Black Sun, the inner light that turns on when we are in extremity to facilitate reflection and insight, our tools of transformation. It is no accident that eyesight is the theme here.

Being human means paying attention. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Plato advises. Without reflection and insight, we can’t evolve. If we can’t evolve, we can’t heal. Finally, if we can’t heal, we’ll hate. Turning inward kicks off the Magnum Opus in which you will attempt to become the Philosopher’s Stone. The process appears in every high- concept Hollywood movie and probably every novel. The Eastern practices prioritize silence and stillness. The Western practice prioritizes storytelling which Moses and Jesus personify. In the turning of the seasons, we need to be able to heal and cure. Sometimes this means sitting still drilling. through layers of reality. Other times this means telling your story in all its layers and even competing versions we tell even ourselves of a single event.

Paying attention means reading the world through the the five-senses augmented with intuition and imagination. If you’re not in a creative mindset, your perception will be limited to the five-senses. You won’t bump into objects, but you also won’t become a Philosopher’s Stone. If you are engaging and discovering your story, the process of which art is a cascade of evidence, an entirely different sense-perception comes into play. Five-sense perception is direct: seer and seen. It is the ultimate confirmation bias. No funny stuff. The funny stuff is this new perception. Rather than seer-seen, it is seer-interpreter-seen, the interpreter being nature, earth, God, cosmos. In story protocol, Nature has a voice.