I believe there is a story-dimension that co-exists with our world. In it every story character is still living for as long as the books can be accessed.
I know this because I have visited the story dimension many times and came back with stories.
And the above is, of course, nonsense.
But:
The importance of nonsense can hardly be overstated. The more clearly we experience something as “nonsense”, the more clearly we are experiencing the boundaries of our own self-imposed cognitive structures. “Nonsense” is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality.
There is no such thing as “nonsense” apart from a judgemental intellect which calls it that.
True artists and true physicists know that nonsense is only that which, viewed from our present point of view, is unintelligible. Non-sense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.
Gary Zukav in The Dancing Wu Li Masters – An Overview of the New Physics
In the beginning there were no stories.
That previous fragment is a story.
The universe begins as a story.
Ben Okri in A Way of Being Free
For shamans and African imagemakers know that we contain the universe inside us, that the sea is in the fish much as the fish is in the sea; that birds breathe their own flight; that forces in the human frame can interpenetrate matter, extend the bounds of time and space, enter the dreams of lions, and travel through the private histories of rivers and mountains.
Ben Okri in A Way of Being Free
And recognising our life stories, bring about the possibility of change.
We live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.
Ben Okri in A Way of Being Free
