0. Prologue: A Trail of Thoughts
This isn’t supposed to be a theory, manifesto or philosophical system. It’s just a jumbled bag of thoughts that, over the past few years, have started to cohere into something like a worldview.
In that time, I’ve lived and worked in China. I’ve weathered a Global Pandemic™. I’ve tried (more or less unsuccessfully) to write a novel. I’ve stumbled across the ideas of thinkers you don’t usually meet in the day-to-day: from Carl Jung to Plotinus.
Drum Tower, Xi’an
More often than not, I found their ideas through the music of Akira the Don, whose Meaningwave project sets spoken-word reflections to sampled music— like TED Talks over an electronic beat.
This essay is an attempt to trace the way my view of the world has changed.
I began as a fairly strict rational materialist: the world was made of things; minds were what brains did; and things like stories, art, and myth — those were decoration, at best. Illusions that might be compelling at times, but were still not “real” in any meaningful sense of the word.
But over time, that started to shift. I began to suspect that stories weren’t decoration at all. In fact, these days, I’ve come to believe we live inside a story. As crazy as it might sound, I think stories are a better way to understand reality as it appears to us than particles and forces.
This isn’t a polished system, and it doesn’t aim to prove anything. But I believe the threads hang together, and I’ll try to weave them into something like a coherent whole. At the very least, they’ve given shape to the novel I’ve been writing — and perhaps to my own sense of meaning.
I’ll break things up along the way with some tracks from Akira the Don that helped open this trail for me.
Here’s a slow-burner to start: the philosopher and communicator of Eastern philosophies, Alan Watts, talking about how easily we’re drawn into seeing the world — what he calls “the web” — in only one way, and how that limited perspective can blind us to what the world really is.
A Certain Point of View – Akira the Don & Alan Watts
If you try to see the world from the perspective of a scientist, who removes their own subjectivity from their observations, you will – surprise, surprise – find that there is no subjectivity in the world. You will see a universe of atoms and forces.
Fair enough.
But perhaps you forgot that you already excluded your own subjectivity in the first place, in order to see it that way?
Try putting it back in, and what do you find?
A world of experiences. A world in which the only thing you can ever say about anything is that you experience it.
Which way of looking at the world is the more “real”?
1. Matter vs What Matters
In 2020, I would have described myself as a convinced rational materialist.
The world, as I understood it then, was made of physical stuff: atoms in motion, molecules reacting, particles forming emergent structures over time. There was no deeper mystery to it than that. Human beings were just complex arrangements of matter. Our thoughts and feelings were functions of biology. Our consciousness, that almost inexplicable sense of “I” — that was an epiphenomenon. A strange glow given off by the brain as it went about its work. Perhaps it was even a sort of illusion.
In this framework, “meaning” didn’t really have anywhere to fit. It was something we projected — not something that existed out there in the world. We told ourselves stories to cope with the vast indifference of the cosmos. That’s all myths, religions, philosophies were: coping mechanisms.
And yet…
Something cracked in that worldview at around the same time the world itself began to crack. I lost my job. The pandemic shut down international travel. Like many other people, I was stuck in a kind of liminal zone, waiting for what would come next.
Like many others, I turned inward. I downloaded music, stocked up on books I had meant to read, and bought a laptop with the idea of finally writing a novel.
Everyone says there’s a novel inside you. I thought maybe it was time to find mine.
The problem was, I couldn’t seem to get going on it. It wasn’t a lack of discipline, it was a lack of direction.
I didn’t want to write something trivial. If I was going to go to this trouble, I wanted it to matter. And so I found myself asking a question that, for a materialist, is surprisingly difficult to answer: what actually matters?
I waited for inspiration. And after a long time, on a lockdown walk, inspiration duly came.
I saw a scene — just a moment, vivid and complete:
A young man and a woman, seated beside a fire in the wilderness. They were on a journey, but he didn’t want to be there. She did. She believed in it. He didn’t. And so, to help him understand what she saw, she began to tell him a story…
Nass telling Delevin the myth of Norinos and Akallaya – Crokokill Art
It was like something inside me had spoken in code.
Obviously, I wanted to know what was the story she was about to tell. Perhaps it would be my story, or perhaps it would be the central conflict of this story.
But in order to know what story she needed to tell him, I had to ask myself the same question she was answering: what story is important enough to shape someone’s life?
That scene stayed with me. It still anchors the novel. It was the first chapter I wrote, and will probably be the last that I revise. I sent it to an artist friend of mine who drew the panels above.
It also cracked open something in me — a realization that stories aren’t just entertainment or even art. The stories we believe — about ourselves, the world, the future — shape the meaning of everything we do. Stories matter to us as much, if not more, than matter itself matters. Which is a strange thing to realize, but it’s true. It was Nietzsche who said “a man with a why can bear almost any how” – and this is the same idea: the story is your why, and if you have a good one, almost anything becomes bearable.
This was the beginning of the shift. I hadn’t stopped being a materialist. But I had started to ask different questions. And then, through Akira the Don’s music, I heard Jordan Peterson speak these words:
“Thousands of years ago, Plato proposed that all knowledge was remembering…”
That phrase struck me. Somehow, I remembered knowing this before.
“…of course we don’t believe that today, because we believe we gather knowledge as a consequence of contact with the world.. But you’ll see today that the knowledge that I’m going to share with you will strike a deep chord of remembering, and it’s because everything that you’ve done throughout your life is in one way or another predicated on what I’m going to tell you today. And I’m going to demonstrate this in a peculiar way, I think, because I’m going to start by telling you a story…”
I had encountered the idea before, but not from Plato.
In the next parts, I’ll consider the idea of archetypes and the “deep grammar” of forms that – contrary to modern understanding – we do in fact seem to be born knowing.
The first place we meet them, usually, is in story.