Stories, like language… that is to say descriptions of circumstances, people, relationships, events… plots and evaluations… implications and possibilities we are conscious of… all of these are fundamentally a strange kind of prosthesis with which we explore (the everything) and ourselves, all of those ‘categories’ where we create and often follow them.

It is absolutely crucial to be skeptical of your stories. It is also crucial to have them. The same is true of language. We must be skeptical of its demands, pronouncements, and authority, but we must also not entirely discard it. This is, in part, because our consciousness is complex (in the sense of a complex plane in mathematics) and must not be ‘collapsed’ to flatness. We need both the prosthesis, and the sketpicism. The fable, and the sudden interruption that reveals it as prosthesis — thus rescuing us from the glamours that are our constant experience and the common result of collapsing the two.

Our stories are not what is or has happened. They are ways of seeing into, emotionally spatializing, and envitalizing experience. These activities are related to rendering experience coherent and habitable.

Our narratives are lenses. We should be skeptical since the character of what we see through them will, almost invariably, be heavy on projections and light on evidence. Reality is actually bizarre enough straight-up that we should skip the chaser of our paranoid and hopeful projections, and just go for the flower as it is, unpainted. How ironic that we may need a story or two to help us find our way to such a flower.