The scope of Stories

Behind the events in the manifest world is an evolving web of mental patterns which I call Great Consciousness. We can simply call these patterns ‘Stories’. The Stories happen on all levels of scale. For example, there will be a Story of one person, which interacts closely with the Stories of a few other people (family and friends). But a larger group of people with looser interactions would be the population of a village. Step back again and see groups of villages and towns as the stories of counties and countries. Soon enough we have the Story of humanity on earth. The earth is filled with so many Stories besides humanity – all the plants and animals, but also the slow turning of the molten metal kernel of the earth itself. And that’s just the earth – move on out again…

Note that all these Stories affect each other – they do not happen in isolation. At some point in the very distant future (about 4 billion years), the Andromeda galaxy (our nearest neighbour) and the Milky Way, our galaxy, will collide and merge. It’s not difficult to imagine that this may have a huge effect on the earth, and any life remaining on it then. So even on a galactic scale, the Stories affect each other.

As explained in the book section ‘An experience plus quantum based model of existence’, Universal Awareness makes the Stories of Great Consciousness manifest by becoming aware of them. What we experience is the development of a particular Story played out in time and space, the four dimensions in which our lives play out – the Story of our Universe. This Universe has the great advantage of time, which allows us to make linear experiences and learn from them, and thus to develop – as individuals, as phyla and as a whole. In fact, this development is the manifestation of development in Great Consciousness, as its Stories evolve.

Stepping back yet again, beyond the time-based or time-like realms of Story and their shaping of manifestation, I find it very possible that there will be other, non-time-like, expressions of the potential of the Divine. But I also assume that they will be so incomprehensible to us (at least, in our present forms of expression, without which we would no longer be ‘us’) that we could never perceive them, and probably not even envisage them.

Stepping back One. Last. Time¹. My final question is, is the all-creating Trinity, which is behind our Universe and possibly many others, itself unique, the only one of its kind? Or could there be other Trinities, Divinities, creative instances of awareness and consciousness, or even instances which create by other means than awareness and consciousness? There could be many of them, like a string or cluster of bubbles. We could even imagine an extrusion of bubbles, as they continue to be created by… something else, an even higher order? Since our own perception is limited to the Awareness of the Divine manifesting our own universe, I see no way we could directly perceive such other realms. But I like to speculate in this way, which keeps my thinking open, flexible and creative.

My use of the word ‘Stories’ stems from one of my teachers: It was Julie Henderson who once said: “And the heavens opened, and GOD spoke – and it was a Story”. Bhagwan (Osho) once described ‘small mind’ as “mind, churning dreams”. Another remarkable person to use the word ‘story’ was Terry Pratchett, in his discworld books featuring witches, e.g. “Granny Weatherwax … believed the world was full of story shapes”.

Finally an excerpt from Terry Pratchett, from his Discworld novel ‘Raising Steam’ (Lu-Tze speaking to Mustrum Ridcully):

What we know is that the universe is a never-ending story that, happily, writes itself continuously.

Yup LOTR – The horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound in the deep…