Broadening Perceptions Through Storytelling: Let’s Try This With Fossil Fuels and Cars
What would happen if we stopped looking at things so literally, as we have been trained to do, and evolve our perceptions much wider?
Let’s take our use of fossil fuels. (Hint: one clue is in the name).
In a literal sense, the fossil fuel process involves extracting oil and gas from the layers of the Earth, and then turning that into fuel for combustible engines that move human bodies all over the Earth in various ways.
If looked at from another point of view… we would see that we are extracting fossils…in other words, the remains of dead plants and animals, past earth creatures. We are syphoning up ancestral elements from deep in our history, using them without much consideration, or much genuflection, and burning them up in order to…what? Move? Have mobility? Speed? We exchange the power of their liquified bodies to enable our modern mobility desires?
Let’s take this even further. Pretend you have had a dream, and upon waking, you explain the dream to friend, you tell them: I dreamt that I went deep, deep, deep into the cracked layers of the Earth and in this Under World I found the liquified remains of Many Deaths and, with great effort, I sucked those Deaths up and up and up through the earth, and then once I brought it to the surface, I swallowed them. I ate them and they allowed me to run all over the earth, so fast. It was magnificent, but as I did this, I realized that the process of me using this death based material killed things too widely, too quickly. I filled the air with toxic smoke, warmed the ocean creatures, burned the forest creatures, so my doing this made too many things die before their time, too fast. Too fast! The Death Bodies I stole from their resting place in the Under World brought more and more death. I felt such great sadness. Such loss. Why was I doing this?
I woke up.
Ok. Let’s now think about highways. These roads grew from a particular historical context and human ecology, tied to fossil fuel extraction, among other things.
A Highway is a literal flat swath of road, that crisscrosses land, and links community to community but the only way to travel on it is to use a car or other wheeled vehicle. But mostly cars. A car is a wheeled vehicle that fits a small number of humans (and maybe a dog) and uses fossil fuels to propel itself forward along roads like highways.
Now, let’s take a little twist in our viewpoint of this. Highways are pressed down flat upon what is otherwise unique and diverse living lands, they flatten and unify the space into grey lifeless hardness, and upon this flattened monotone surface, small groups of people travel at great speeds in cars, never talking to the others in the other cars. They are trapped inside the cars until they emerge somewhere and open the door and then they get to escape into open air and communities.
Now, imagine you had a dream about highways and cars, and you tell a friend: I dreamt I was in a small container, and it moved along these flat surfaces that crisscrossed all over the natural land, surfaces that killed everything where it landed, a flatness so unnatural it was unable to absorb rain. And I can only go as far as those pathways will let me go, they control where I go and I can’t get out until the container I am in stops, and I don’t get to see other people in their containers until their containers stop, and near the end of the dream, my container stopped, and another container stopped, and I got out of mine as they got out of theirs and we saw each other across an expanse of hot tarmac and I wanted to run forward and hug them because I was so lonely, having travelled so far trapped in my small container but we couldn’t do that because it would seem too strange. Which was a feeling that bothered me. Our connection would seem strange! But really it was our entrapment in separation that was the oddity!
Then I woke up.
Well. All right. We have now travelled through six layers of story, moving through the literal to the metaphorical to the dreamscape realm.
What does this process mean? Why move through the layers of story that encircle what literally happens in the modern world?
I consider this to be a much needed practice and inquiry.
What happened to you as you read these?
Does this give us deeper insights? Can we access multiple viewpoints which could lead to multiple points of renewal, multiple paths of future potential…?
If you turn whatever you’re looking at upside down. Come at it from the sides. Enter it through the back doors.
If we can breathe life into the archetypal, the poetic, the imaginary, the dream, feel into our liminal perceptions, our imaginative powers, that have always been here with us, a skill as human to us as breathing.
We know how to do this. We have been encouraged to forget but you can easily remember, remember?
Remember. And give it a try.
Pierce the assumed singularity of the literal. Probe beyond.
What messages await?
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