LOTS Chapter Six, Part 1: STORY and BELIEF

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In this reading from Chapter 6 of Language of the Soul, Dominick explores the profound relationship between language, storytelling, belief, and the human experience. He examines how stories have carried our values, preserved our history, and helped transform abstract ideas into culture, tradition, and shared meaning.

Moving through philosophy, comparative religion, mythology, psychology, and emerging scientific thought, this chapter reflects on humanity's enduring search for connection, purpose, and understanding. Along the way, it considers how the stories we inherit—and the stories we choose to tell—shape not only our individual identities, but the future of society itself.

If you want the deeper mechanics of how personal experience becomes belief and how belief becomes policy, part two is next. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves big questions, and leave a review with the story you think we should replace.

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Transcript

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Chapter 6. Story and Belief The Power of the Word. According to anthropologists, language has been around for nearly half of human history. In previous chapters, we've explored how our conceptual realm is inextricably linked to language, specifically the domain of ethics and morals. We've looked at how our individual worldviews and value systems synthesize to forge an overarching philosophical consensus. This sphere of norms, Moray's institutions, codes, laws, and policy can be thought of as the status quo that's passed on through social conditioning. None of this would be possible without conceptual cognition, the juxtaposition

Language Sparks The Noosphere

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of abstract ideas. This kind of reasoning in turn relies on language. I've suggested throughout this book that the evolution of this invisible realm, what Thielhardt de Chardin dubbed our noosphere, is as crucial to our survival as that of our biology? Simply put, without tampering our base drives with ethics and morals, the human race would have long ago rendered itself extinct, competing for resources. With this in mind, how did the moral realm of ideas take the front seat to our biology? At what point in our evolution did our sophisticated brains step in to look out for us by curbing base tribal instincts that no longer served proliferation, persistence, and survival? As hinted at above, our Noosphere was largely birthed with the advent of language. And all those new cutting-edge ideas begged to be expressed, reincarnated as it were, in the perceptual realm. Along came story. As long as language has been around, story has been the vehicle for expressing abstract ideas. Still, I would argue there was a moment in time when modern Judeo-Christian storytelling, as we know it in the Western world, was put on the fast track. Creation myths, parables that explain nature, and other forms discussed in earlier chapters were alive and well in oral tradition throughout prehistory and antiquity. But story as an expression of the human condition, as the handbook for life in the physical realm, may have its roots in distinct evolutionary milestones. The 2004 Time magazine article of The God Gene posited that genetic predisposition alone accounted for the brain chemistry shared by our prophets and messiahs, that a particular balance of neurotransmitters gifted them an inclination to connect dots, to sense interconnectivity, and to project numinous significance on otherwise neutral events. Staunch empiricists have long dismissed meaning or profundity, leveling similar blows on creative geniuses, artists, and innovators who seemed to have a direct line to the divine. In antiquity, oracles were not the sole conduits in possession of this postulated brain chemistry. So were the poets, rhapsodes, and playwrights who scribed their name in the stars. Storytellers were not just historians, but the keepers of the human condition. However you view our prophets and the storytellers who carved them a place in history, consider that our sophisticated nervous systems, the prefrontal cortex in particular, had evolved to the point of self-consciousness. It gave humans the ability to take a meta view of the human condition and man's place in the universe. And things may have looked a bit grim. Messiahs like Christ, Buddha, and Muhammad surfaced during a relatively short window of time in our dialectic, and for very good reason. Their message of love and compassion was much needed. In case that characterization does not immediately land, perhaps framing the impasse in another way is in order. Their message was one of unity, an

Messiahs And The Unity Story

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acknowledgement of the entanglement of every particle of the universe. Recognizing and holding this interconnectivity sacred what served to prevent humankind not only from ravaging his own habitat by squandering resources, but from killing itself off by competing for them. My chosen word love has often been used interchangeably with God. God is love, the saying goes in certain circles. It would be sophomoric to attempt reconciling man's infinite conceptions of God, from the ultimate creator, a personified daddy in the sky thumbing his long flowing beard, to the notion of God as an intelligent binding force. In modernism, God is often thought of as collective intelligence, the very universal force that propagates life. In a recent development, as an alternative to religious doctrine, intelligent design is now taught as part of many public school curricula. However one conceives or dismisses the concept of God, one thing is clear. At a certain point in human history, creation stories, polytheistic notions, and nods to the afterlife from antiquity quickly yielded to the idea of unity. Conduits, sages, thought leaders, and spiritual gurus appeared the world over to share this message of love that would redeem us from self-destruction. In essence, it promised to save us from ourselves by holding up a mirror to our interconnectivity. The idea that the human condition was not a purely physical state of being, but one involving a transcendent spiritual component was nothing new, but this new model of it spread with startling efficiency against great odds. Disciples of these messiahs and prophets spread the word through philosophy, wisdom tradition, and religion. Ticking an evolutionary theory perspective, with the premise that all enduring societal institutions serve our proliferation in some way, it is logical to conclude that without tempering our base drives and tribal instincts, we would self-destruct. There is, of course, an argument to be made that things quickly went awry the moment institutionalized religion was used to control the populace and justify wars. But there is an equally compelling argument that the original message was hijacked to ill purpose. The intelligence that drives evolution coexists with many other forces, rendering dialectic a less than perfect science. Though many posit humans have evolved an internal moral compass, with or without a sacred handbook, it's daunting to imagine what would have transpired without the emergence of spiritual tradition. Even the most skeptical among us must acknowledge the fact that at this moment in history, the human race inflicts less physical hand-to-hand violence on its own per capita than ever before. Harvard Stephen Pinker popularized this view in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. More recently, however, anthropologist Rahul Oka at the University of Notre Dame has challenged the redeeming notion violence is on the decline. Those dead set on seeing the glass half empty will suggest violence has simply been subverted into oppression, marginalization, exploitation, slave trade, and human trafficking. Regardless, overt physical violence is at an all-time low, according to most anthropologists and sociologists. The bottom line is, survival instincts served humankind early on when man was still competing for a foothold. But base drives like scarcity mentality and competition for resources eventually led to a great deal of bloodshed and warfare that proved a dead end road. Unmitigated, the base drives that propagated early nomadic tribes were poised to do us in, absent something more, something loftier. The thing is, the message of love that appeared in human dialectic is anything but a nightlight, a comforting notion designed to assign meaning to a dog eat dog world. It is more essential than the promise of order and chaos, or redemption and damnation. With the right goggles on, an intelligent binding force at the center of the universe may be the ultimate truth. Accepting metaphysical notions of spirituality may just be a matter of semantics. Consider that mechanistic Newtonian science has long sought to quantify the universe in terms of classical physics, quantum mechanics, cell biology, and even medicine. But we have yet to explain the observer effect. The very existence of a material universe is questionable at best. Without an observer, without consciousness. Consider that on a cellular level, energetic forces trump chemical environmental factors when it comes to growth or protection responses. In other words, energetic signals take precedence over local chemical signaling through the cell wall. Locally, these signals originate from thoughts and feelings. But we are learning more every day about non-local

Science Meets Consciousness And Energy

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energetic signaling. It may well turn out that collective consciousness, the intelligence that drives all life in the universe, is truly running the show. The way I put it is this cell biology talks endlessly about how DNA is just a blueprint for life. Once a cell differentiates, it self-creates all day every day. It creates enzymes, proteins, peptides, and even neurotransmitters by rearranging molecules. But few really talk about the intelligent force inherent in energetic signaling that shuttles those molecules around on an as-needed basis. Beyond a polite nod to dualism, mechanistic Newtonian science is not fond of acknowledging the ghost in the machine. If the idea of non-local energetic communication as consciousness is a leap for you, the reader, let me take a different tack. Consider quantum entanglement, the very principle that sets modern quantum mechanics apart from classical physics. In brief, particles entangled through physical interaction or common origins behave in an identical fashion even when separated by great distance. The phenomenon suggests an interconnectivity between all particles of the universe, since the Big Bang. For some, embracing the idea of God or love as a binding force is a matter of semantics. Traditionally, staunch empiricists resist dualistic notions of consciousness as anything other than a byproduct of biology. The idea of collective consciousness is an even harder pill to swallow for many. In my economy, quantum entanglement, along with the celebrated hundredth monkey effect, make a strong case for intelligent non-local communication via collective consciousness. Though controversial, the original findings are often misconstrued in popular culture. The hundredth monkey effect refers to the mysterious appearance of new behaviors once a critical mass is reached in a given population in gene pools that are geographically separate. However misunderstood, the phenomenon merits further research. After all, man once believed the world was flat. We discover startling new truths about the universe every day. To view our current understanding of it as anything more than the tip of a mysterious iceberg qualifies as pure hubris. Semantically speaking, when it comes to a universal binding force, the trick may lie in swapping out the word love, God, or collective intelligence for something more palatable, something more akin to energy, without the added personification of thought, will, or intent. Semantics is important here. Language has always proven insufficient to approximate the ineffable. I go back to my favorite quote from Decoding the Secret Patterns to Nature in response to the nearly impeccable numbering of flower petals according to Fibonacci's celebrated numerical sequence. The question is posed, do flowers know math? The playful but insightful answer They don't need to. They're the expression of it. Oh the humanity. Our moral realm, conceptual in nature, evolved as a form of adaptation. It relied on abstract cognition, which was reliant on language. Clearly there was an evolutionary advantage to evolving ideas. It could be said that seemingly redeeming human traits like altruism, kindness, bonding affinity and love are simply survival-based instincts that serve the persistence of the tribe. It could be said that we've simply given these inclinations fancy names, thanks to the gift of language. In the same way otherwise neutral physiological excitement in a dog, the wagging of a tail, is personified as happy, we characterize the universe's propagating force as love or God.

Platonic Values And Human Meaning

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But is this nothing more than applying lipstick to a pig? Man has always been fond of distinguishing himself from the rest of the animal kingdom. Better put, placing himself above other contenders, with a bit of dominion thrown in for good measure. It's been said that what separates us from animals is everything from our opposable thumbs to our ability to reason. Whether one takes an imperialist view or a symbiotic view of our place in the world, the metacognition, sentience, afforded higher mammals via the prefrontal cortex is a pretty sure front runner for what distinguishes us. Unconscious, instinctual responses are all our lizard brains are capable of repeating, but our prefrontal cortex has gifted us new responses to novel stimuli, the capacity to learn new behaviors and reactions and hardwire them. Not only that, but we have the ability to assess our own impulses and temper them with intellect. In other words, to assert free will. For that reason, though many seem to be cruising on autopilot, or obeying the lizard brain, if you will, mankind on the whole has spent a great deal of time navelgazing about what makes us human. I'll suggest in this chapter that our penchant for attaching meaning to survival is uniquely human. I'll also argue that our moral conceptual realm on the whole distinguishes, if not elevates, the human race. It has yielded an inexhaustible domain as rich or richer than the perceptual domain. Man's loftier ideas comprise the aforementioned salvation from his baser nature. Counted among what have become known as Platonic values are notions like truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, love, compassion, joy, equanimity, and kindness. As values we aspire to, they are arguably what make us human. Even contradictions in terms like the ethics of war are distinctly human, as are the constitutional principles of personal liberty and equanimity we so often fall short of in the democratic experiment that is the United States. Our failure to embody what we aspire to is often dubbed human frailty, and it seems to be part and parcel of the human condition. With this in mind, it may well be that what makes us human is not the embodiment of platonic values, but our undying penchant for aspiring to them. To be human, then, is to strive for redemption, to redeem sheer survival with meaning. The question becomes whether we are in fact sifting through chaos to glean the meaning of it, or simply attributing it. In either case, correlating meaning with survival is uniquely human. Religion does not have a monopoly on morals or ethics, nor does philosophy. Hopefully, if nothing else, the connection between language and the realm of ideas it availed is exceedingly clear. From the very origin of Homo sapiens, we have been stargazers, pondering our place in the universe. Spiritual tradition simply served as a catalyst for modern storytelling forms. But the fact remains, from oral tradition on, story has assessed the human condition and reflected it back. As often as not, story has taught us how to live in the world, with an eye on our potential for growth and evolution. How Story stole the show? It's fair to speculate that life pre-language was largely experiential. Without language, abstract cognition was amorphous, lacking in form. Then along came the adaptive advantage of language, and everything changed. Our moral and ethical realm evolved precisely due to the advent of language. This innovation meant we could now arrange abstract concepts as subjects and predicates, symbolized by words, and juxtapose them in a logical way in order to draw new conclusions. We could take opposing ideas and synthesize them, leading to an exponential explosion of the conceptual domain. The floodgates were effectively opened. With this in mind, it could be argued that morals and ethics are synonymous with the tool of language. When language became the road method to convey ideas or concepts, story was soon to follow. Story quickly became synonymous with the conceptual realm, morals and ethics in particular. It just so happens that in the course of human history, the juxtaposition of these ideas took figural form once again. From the moment God sported a long white beard and began creating the world in his image, parable, allegory, and fable became the expression of ideas. If it's human to infuse survival with meaning, storytellers and artists are the gatekeepers of it. We reveal the meaning and existence through word and image, providing the something more that lends it richness. Storytellers and artists reveal rare glimpses of the transcendent, the numinous, and the profound. In the ultimate irony, however, literary criticism has devoted itself to reinterpreting creative efforts to discern their relevance. When it comes to Scripture, hermeneutics and exegesis sift through subjectivity and cultural relativity to arrive at the Word of God as channeled by mortal prophets. More often than not, however, what's canonized is the doctrine and dogma that serves power structures like institutionalized religion. Whether one sees our prophets and messiahs as conduits for universal truth or just hacks who possess the brain chemistry described in Time magazine's article, The God Gene, their role in the course of human history is undeniable. Liturgical tradition and hermeneutics arguably formed the basis of modern literary criticism. Literary forms and sacred texts like parable and allegory were dissected as emblematic representations of not just the human condition, but man's place in the universe. They revealed startling truths about existence through simple metaphor. These truths spoke not only of the human condition, but of the true metaphysical nature of the universe. Perhaps more startling evidence of the universal truth scripture reveals are the similarities that appear from one tradition to the next, often in cultures that had no contact with one another. The field of comparative religion has devoted itself to drawing parallels and identifying the common threads between religious traditions the world over. In the Hero with a Thousand Faces, comparative religion expert Joseph Campbell has compiled the elemental handbook for recurring templates that speak to our innate wiring for understanding the mechanics of the world in which we live. The Chicken and the Egg Again. The relationship between concept and percept is reciprocal. We assign linguistic symbols to tangible forms while expressing abstract ideas through figurative images. In the same way, our ideas and our biology inform one another perpetually. In other words, experience in the physical realm crafts the individual worldviews that collectively become consensus. In turn, this consensus is imparted through social conditioning, inculcating individuals once again. It's a vicious cycle. It may be helpful to employ a visual to this phenomenon. Picture an individual encoding all his life experiences

Belief Systems Built By Conditioning

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on a thumb drive titled Worldview, then uploading it to a cloud titled Status Quo. Now picture the next generation downloading this status quo from the collective cloud through socialization. Finally, picture this cycle recurring ad infinitum. Human beings are the sole life forms to learn vicariously. Oh, all organisms encode life experience for survival, then pass on the database. Higher mammals, however, due to their sophisticated limbic systems, can augment the inherited instinctual responses of the lizard brain with novel responses learned through life experience. Though all organisms quote learn growth or protection responses to environmental stimuli, humans seem to be the sole species who can adopt beliefs through mere suggestion. From our friends and family, our educators, the media, and so on. Collectively, these influences constitute our social conditioning. From the moment we arrive on the planet, we are inculcated. With ideas about the world, many of which severely limit potential. The uniquely human predilection of learning vicariously, adopting the perceptions of others, has its perks, but as often as not, the perceptions of others, let's call them beliefs for our purposes, can be ill founded. Simply put, erroneous beliefs can be damaging. Dangerous. Prejudice, bigotry, racism, and capitalist greed, for example, can have a counterproductive impact on our social evolution. Some schools of thought, like Hegel's Dialectic, hold that all pendulum swings contribute to forward movement. Personally, I place great faith in the universal intelligence that drives moral evolution. But we all know regression when we see it. Think the Dark Ages, the rise of fascism during World War II, the Taliban, the Iranian Revolution, and the reversal of Roe V. Wade. Growing pains in human dialectic can be uncomfortable at best. For now the connection I am offering is the one between beliefs, both personal and societal, and what they manifest. An understanding of this relationship may be gently nudging you, the reader, toward the premise of this chapter. If learned perceptions can be thought of as beliefs, the power of collective beliefs is immeasurable. Beliefs are contagious. They gather to form movements, trends, schools of thought, dogmas, ideologies, political platforms and parties, and so on. And when they take hold, the entire course of human history is redirected. If Marxism brought us Hitler and Christian doctrine fueled both the crusades and the Inquisition, the power of ideas should be self-evident. The decades long Cold War has been called the quintessence of ideological warfare. You, the reader, are likely already speculating about the role story plays in all of this. Even so, I will give you a hint. All these history altering ideas were nothing more than stories we told about ourselves. Our examples of the Crusades and the Inquisition point to a popular sentiment that exemplifies the power of ideas alone. Most wars are fought over religion. It would seem all spiritual tradition is based in love and compassion, and yet, spirituality's seemingly evil twin, institutionalized religion, gets the bad rap. The caveat I use to explain this discrepancy is this. World leaders in institutionalized power structures categorically use the innate push button of religion to justify wars that are really about power,

How Stories Fuel Wars And Power

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resources, or territory. Propaganda riles the requisite sentiment, be it the anti-communist sentiment of the Cold War or the anti Muslim sentiment that was a red herring in the war against terror. Whether I've sufficiently exonerated spirituality is of no consequence. Let's not split hairs. The fact remains ideas matter. Beliefs matter. Recap tying it all together. On the microcosmic level, individuals map personal experience throughout life, weaving a tapestry we call a value system or worldview. On a macrocosmic level, collective human experience is woven into the status quo. The reciprocal function is ironic. The status quo is then downloaded again through social conditioning, determining the capacity and potential of the subsequent generation. It's mind blowing to consider the impact social conditioning has on our collective potential, or conversely, our limitations. We are taught that man cannot fly, therefore he does not. It's as simple as that. Everything

Recap Plus A Tease For Part Two

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from aging equals falling apart to women are from Venus, men are from Mars, to the overrated view that life is a matter of survival of the fittest, determine how things will play out by those who adopt these notions. The powerful hold early development places on potential, both perceptions of the world and beliefs about it, is beautifully illustrated in a study conducted by neuroscientists David Hubble and Torsten Weisel. In it, groups of kittens were raised in two separate environments, one composed of vertical stripes and the other horizontal. When released from the environment in which they'd been raised, the group raised with only horizontally striped wallpaper simply could not perceive vertical objects and found themselves running into chairs and table legs. Similarly, the other group were blind to horizontal forms like seat cushions they would otherwise lounge on. The world is a stage. The bulk of this book has been devoted to exploring how the individual transforms through storytelling, and by extension, how society evolves collectively. We've examined the mechanics of personal transformation, from its chemical basis to the phenomenon of catharsis. But how exactly do individual subjective worldviews and value systems become the status quo on the macro scale? What are the mechanics of this process? The one that forges the universal thought forms and paradigms that open the door to human potential, or conversely, severely limit our capacity? How does personal experience become belief? And how do personal beliefs become widespread paradigms, norms, mores, and even policy? More germane to the spirit of this book, how does story impact all of this? To dive deeper into this question, tune in to part two of this episode. Until then, remember, life is story, and we can get our hands in the clay. Individually and collectively, we can tell a new story. See you next time.