We all hunger for stories. Stories give form to our desires, feelings, and goals, molding how we view just about everything - from our own bodies to what is sacred or profane, good or bad, possible or impossible. Stories give us figures to emulate, imitate, admire or abhor. And it is from the stories we are told that we in turn unconsciously fashion our own life scripts.
Most of us, like our parents before us, are not aware of all this. So we usually just tell our children the kinds of stories we were told or the stories easily available through popular books, magazines, films, and television. This is what my parents did with me, and I in turn did with my own children. So now they, like me and like most of us, face the task of reexaminating and refashioning the stories and images that clutter our imagination: the task of becoming aware of the story lines we carry inside us, and of finding or creating stories and images that expand rather than limit our horizons.
This is why there is today so much interest in both very ancient and very new myths. This is not just, as we are sometimes told, a "new Age" fad. It stems from the recognition that many of our myths are not only inappropriate for our rapidly changing world but misleading about human possibilities. Most important, it stems from the growing consciousness that how we image our personal and social paths, can profoundly affect both our own lives and those of others.
Again, this is not to say that all we have to do is change our stories and images.
But even the most cursory glance at modern history shows that is is only because a small group of venturesome women and men dared to image different political, economic, and sexual relations - courageously challenging long-established institutitons such as slavery and the divine right of kings to rule - that we have gradually been able to change many painful and inhuman realities.
As we have seen, this is basically what the modern revolution of consciousness is about: the gradual deconstruction and reconstruction of the stories and images that have for so long served to mold our minds, bodies and souls to fit the requirements of a system driven by punishment, fear and pain. As we have also seen, this revolution in consciousness is today moving into a second stage animated by the awakening consciousness that we do have choices, that we can make changes, and that these changes are essential in our high technology age of nuclear bombs and threatened ecological disasters.
There are no guarantees that we will succeed in freeing ourselves from the myths and structures that still bind us to dysfunctional, painful, and unjust ways of living and dying. But even attempting it is in itself an extraordinary adventure: a journey thatis at the same time inward and ouward, taking us toward ever deeper levels of consciousness and ever wider and more fulfilling life paths. Because, paradoxically, the more integrated we become as we strive to fashion our own life scripts, the more open we are to further changes in consciousness. And the more we dare to try out new paths, like all explorers of new territory, the more we open up to further paths, that make it possible for us to experience life in new ways we never thought possible.
If I write of this with such conviction it is because as my own consciousness has radically changed over the last three decades, so also has my life. Certainly there has been pain, as there is for all of us who no longer try to numb ourselves through all the ways developed in dominator societies for people to go through life only half aware and awake, to deaden the pain we carry from our past or to blind us to the pain of others. There have even been times when it has been extremely painful, when I wondered if it was worth the struggle.
But I can unequivocally say it was. For it has opened my mind, my heart, and in the sense of that which in all of us is most truly evolved, my soul. Above all, it has opened up for me the enormous possibilities of love, including a more loving acceptance of myself. And I am far from alone in this, as the search for new and different paths is today becoming a worldwide quest.
It is still by and large a quest by solitary travelers only slowly beginning to link up with one another to discover that they are part of a new community in the making. It is certainly not yet a quest reflected in the mainstream stories of violence, depersonalized sex, alienation, brutality, and cynicism that, as George Gerbner and others have shown, maintain existing power imbalances. Yet if we persevere, some of the stories of those who today have the courage to question, the will to choose, and the human power to give and receive love will be the basis for new myths: myths about new Eves and new Adams who, against all obstacles, laid the groundwork for social structures that foster - rather than impede - the great capacity for pleasure from caring connections that, by the grace of evolution, has been given us to enjoy.
Riane EislerAuthor of Sacred Pleasure
