SPINNING A NARRATIVE THREAD

How should we define the narrative thread of our lives? Is there, indeed, such a thread - or do we evolve randomly, haphazardly, undirected by soul or spirit? If we do exist coherently, then is there a blueprint for each life, determined before that life begins? Is it legitimate to say we are subject to the workings of destiny?

Whether destiny drives us or not, I believe we invent our life's purpose by creating stories: we each become our narratives. It is that persistent endeavour which spins something that looks, at least in retrospect, like a consistent narrative thread.

All that stands as the sea-wall between us and a wider mode of being is our limited notion of identity. Without a working story we cannot endure the enormity of existence. But our individual narratives reflect a bounded perspective - their usefulness lies not in any abiding truth but in their protective value: they motivate us to continue surviving.

There are small narratives and there are large ones. The great stories, reaching back millennia, store our best secrets. They make a coherent weave out of a vast tangle of personal narrative threads. Their archetypes represent whatever significance humankind has so far discovered in itself. If as individuals we are large enough to engage with these archetypal themes, we can ride the imagination into far greater expressiveness of being.

If significance is to permeate a life and give it quality, there must be some grasp of a wider context: the setting of an individual life against the background of universal existence. But in the course of developing self-consciousness we may have forfeited the reposeful innocence which connects us with such a vision. Pragmatically, we are likely to value things according to how well they serve us. Such a restricted view undermines our sense of the connectedness of life, and much of our contemporary culture reflects this. The identity crisis which as a species we appear to be suffering may actually be a crisis of the imagination.

Carl Jung said 'Man cannot stand a meaningless life'. The riddle of meaning permeates everything, whether confronted or not. It informs all our desires and terrors. Fearful of physical extinction, there yet persists a secret longing to have the whole business solved, and dissolved. That longing may be a remnant of an earlier state of grace, when, as a less cerebral species, we experienced the immanence of life and death without the protection of personal narratives.

Significance does not lie in the spinning of a personal narrative thread, but in its inclusion in the universal weave. Such a weave is greater than the sum of its threads, and has its own dynamic. It is possible that our striving towards personal coherence is in fact a property of the weave itself, as it unfolds in accordance with a wider patterning which in the confines of our present form we cannot hope to perceive.

As humanity strives to evolve in consciousness, it may be attempting to dismantle one view of itself before properly embarking on another. Straddling an ego-centric mode and a liberating collectivity, it stands between one great story and the next. Inspiration for the adventure can readily be found in those archetypal explorers, the gods and saviours, heroes, heroines, warriors, winners - beings of inextinguishable potency - who stand distinct and make their mark and are not erased. Whether we are in conscious thrall to this pantheon or not, by any definition of consensus reality such gods exist. Their temples are everywhere; they are spell-binders within the collective imagination.

Increasingly, television and movies brim with inspirational heroic fantasy. Earlier mythologies had their gods disporting themselves in the heavens; many of our heroes similarly enact their redemptive themes against the limitless background of space. Whenever humanity makes another lurch forward, it rebuilds, however crudely, a new pantheon from the old: hence Gilgamesh-Hercules-Superman-Jean-Luc Picard...

Any evolutionary transition requires a dismantling of old and invalid ways of perception. Understandably we resist such intimate dismemberment. The danger is that in disowning the process, it becomes magnified. Our `weapons of mass destruction' - capable of destroying all that is physical and external - may be a tangible metaphor for the unconscious dissolution of obsolete thought-structures. Within us thanatos prowls as powerfully as ever. Unrecognised, dishonoured, it may well have the last word.  It seems important, therefore, to restore our connection with the archetypal, and to reactivate the great stories in ways that will renew our sense of connectedness and awe; or else our prevailing psychological distress may drive us to generate and play out destructive dramas of our brokenness - threatening not only our fragile personal narratives but our collective future.

All the great stories recount the human evolutionary struggle from a detached, universal perspective. The mythopeic imagination evaluates existence from the point of view of the entire story, allowing significance only to whatever furthers the pattern. Our panoply of invincible super-beings have always been exemplars of this transpersonal perspective. The archetypes animating every great story are distinct, self-loyal threads of the weave; yet their personal qualities arise solely from the demands of the wider pattern. This ability to remain true to type, yet always act in keeping with the narrative whole, defines the archetypal way of being. Within each great story is all the information needed for self-determination within the weave. By casting our personal narrative in the greater mould, we may perhaps achieve coherence, and diminish the tendency towards individual psychological fragmentation. 

Yet it can be argued, equally, that identification with the greater narratives, especially religious ones, have acted as unifying forces - only to bring about subsequent disintegration through social conflict.  Idealism may ignite the human spirit but, like fire, it has its own inherent dangers.  However, there are ways of engaging with the archetypal narratives which do not involve senseless conflagration in defence of ideas and beliefs. By allowing ourselves to be transported in the bloodstream of the great stories, we assent to parameters likely to expand the limits of any personal narrative. If our species is to survive, such imaginative expansion would seem necessary.  Without a sense of belonging within a more significant context, our increasingly fragmented personal narratives could eventually progress towards a disastrous unravelling; the signs of such dissociation are already very much in evidence.