I want to tell you about a story.

I want to tell you a little bit about some fiction that I came across at the during the latest new moon. Ishmael by Daniel Quinn was a surprise for me. I was inspired to read it, (well actually I listened to an audio book), because of a documentary called "What a way to go (life at the end of empire)", which had a very particular message.
The message of this documentary, and this book was particular, because of the exploration of the idea of a cultural story or narative. The proposition is that we ALL live out our lives, en-acting a cultural narative, which is all pervasive, and forms a total world view. This narrative is not so obvious, because we build other narratives on top of it, from personal to family to social class narratives, and religious narratives. But the thought that underlaying this was a universal cultural narrative which is at the base of all of our global world civilization certainly rung a big bell for me.
I instantly related this idea to the Buddhist idea of conditioning. And it made such an esoteric idea, suddenly concrete, by calling such a process the continual enactment of a story.
This story is an unwritten story, because it is exists in the twilight of our collective consciousness. This story is the base of our founding mythologies, and each one of us pieces together the story ourselves when we are young, and in so doing we make the story our own.
The revelation in the books by Daniel Quinn is that this story is actually not that old. Only 10,000 years old. And it was the founding story which made a certain tribe of humans begin to develop what rapidly became "totalitarian agriculture". This story is the manifesto of that agricultural revolution.
Now the thing about stories is that they are never True in an absolute sense. Indeed they are always fictions. But believing a story always leads to an en-action of that story with real consequences or results.
For example, if your car breaks down, and you have a story which leads you to believe that the fuel pump is broken, then you may get under the hood, with a wrench and start to take the engine apart, and if the reality is that you have run out of petrol, then not only are you wasting your energy, you may be making your situation worse.
So if our cultural story is similarly miss aligned with reality, then it will lead us to equally destructive actions. Daniel Quinn's thesis is that this is precisely the situation. In Ishmael he describes the adventure of our agricultural revolution as like the launching of a early flying machine from a cliff top, the machine could never possibly fly because the basis of construction defies the laws of aerodynamics. Similarly the story that we began to enact with our agricultural revolution also defied a fundamental law of life on this planet.
I won't go on, please read the book if you can.
When I think of the conflict in Gaza at present I am reminded that it has been described as a problem of two conflicting narratives. Gosh I think, if Daniel Quinn is right, and I suspect his is on the right path with this, then both of those two narratives are built upon another narrative which we all share. The flaw in this narrative, makes the arising of those two conflicting narratives inevitable. From the seed of this agricultural revolution grew a very strange and destructive plant, where unlike any other tree in the garden, the branches of this tree fought with themselves, and the the tree like a weed, devoured the entire garden, until when everything was left in desolation, it destroyed itself having nothing left to devour.
I do hope that we can wake up to our destructive story and with consciousness step away making instead a more harmonious story for ourselves.