The Parallels Between Storytelling and Enlightenment – Part 1 – Stefan Emunds

The Advantage of Fiction over Non-fiction

Fiction has a decisive advantage over non-fiction: non-fiction is telling, fiction is showing. Many enlightenment non-fiction books talk about enlightenment (nothing wrong with that), but few show how to do it, and even fewer show enlightened states of mind.

The idea of showing enlightenment tempted me to venture into fiction writing, and I became a Visionary Fiction author. And I did what all other aspiring writers did: I parachuted straight into the writing jungle. And, like everybody else, I got lost. Five years into my writing adventure, I had learned a lot, but still felt lost. Like lost in the mountains. Learning fiction writing felt like scrambling up a mountain (a craft or skill) just to discover a new one. I needed a reorientation. I looked for an overview of the writing craft, a map, but couldn’t find one and so, I created a map myself. When I was done, I realized other writers may look for a storytelling map too. That prompted me to turn my map into a book on writing: The Eight Crafts of Writing.

While writing about writing, I realized that storytelling and enlightenment have interesting parallels. This prompted me to write this article.

The Enlightenment Perspective on Life

Incarnation is like an RPG game. Our body-mind-ego vehicle is our avatar and Planet Earth the game. During incarnation, we have all sorts of experiences with our avatar, and when it dies, we return to the soul world. Until the next round.

One could also say that life is a play.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
– William Shakespeare

Experiences are the purpose of incarnation. Our soul extracts wisdom and understanding and empathy from experiences and takes them with it to the soul world.

Stories are virtual experiences from which we can extract wisdom, understanding, and empathy as well. As you can see, stories cater to the soul’s existential need.

The great thing about stories is they allow us to gain wisdom, understanding, and empathy fast and without the repercussions that come with real-life experiences.

Seekers of Visions

We use enlightenment techniques, like meditation, to take our mind to places where it can experience higher and veiled aspects of reality and the self. The results are visions or revelations.

Stories can take the mind to such places too. What are devotional and visual meditations but tiny enlightenment stories?

Most fiction writers take readers to remote emotional places. Visionary Fiction authors use the power of storytelling to take readers to enlightened states of mind. I believe the magic of storytelling is one reason many ancient spiritual scriptures are in story form.

Stories Are Inspiring Struggles With Adversity

In the earliest days of storytelling, people took real-life adventures, like raiding a village, surviving a storm, or abducting a woman of another clan, and told the tale at the campfire.

Over time, storytellers learned to gild real-life adventures with dramatic devices and how to invent stories. Thus, storytelling became an art form.

Joseph Campbell analyzed hundreds of stories, extracted dramatic devices, categorized them, and put them in a sequence. That became the Hero’s Journey. But since the Hero’s Journey looks at stories through the lens of art, it does not explain what a story really is, neither does it reveal story dynamics. If we want to understand what makes stories tick, we need to take a wide step back and examine the origin of storytelling, which is rooted in real life.

Stories are dramatized virtual adventures.

Adventures are inspiring struggles with adversity.

No adversity, no story. Stories without adversity are just anecdotes.

Empathy is the Soul’s Gold

Leo Tolstoy accomplished this extraordinary feat with Anna Karenina – mind he was a man. Les Miserables drew attention to the poor and sick, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin uncovered the intolerable life of African American slaves.

All Quiet On the Western Front gives readers a sense of the dread of war. Memoirs of a Geisha reveals the good and bad times of female Japanese entertainers, and Changeling allows us to feel with women suffering from cryptic abuse. Philadelphia shows how it is to die of AIDS and be abused in the process, and The Elephant Man reveals what it is like to be a kind soul in a freakish body. A Time to Kill delivers empathy as a revelatory story climax.

Stories that promote novel empathy always have the potential to become classics.

About the author

Stefan writes inspirational non-fiction, visionary fiction, and runs an online enlightenment workshop. Enlightenment and storytelling have interesting parallels, which enticed Stefan to write a book about storytelling – The Eight Crafts of Writing. Stefan was born in Germany and, after graduating, enjoyed two years backpacking in Australia, New Zealand, and South-East Asia. Back home, he studied general electro-technology and pursued a career as a sales and business development manager in Europe, Middle East, and Asia. Semi-retired now, he lives with his son in the Philippines.