The Power of a Story
I can gather a thousand black letters together but it needs to have a narrative, a flow to make my point understood. Unless I can grab your focus with the narrative, all the words I pour in this page will be just that … words. Words without emotion are air. Powerless and transient. Stories on the other hand carry a power to change the world. They carry experience and the wisdom that arises out of that experience.
I really love this 15th century devotional hymn written in Gujrati language, it beautifully expresses my point.
“वैष्णव जन तो तेने कहिये जे पीड परायी जाणे रे”
Only those are the people of god who understand the paint of others.
Unless you can step into the shoes other others and feel their experience you will only be limited to your own life. If you have the power to put yourself in other’s shoes you can experience more than one life. You can understand how it is like to fight in a war without ever being in an army, you can learn the rules of magic without it being a real thing, and you can even learn how to face complex life problems by knowing about the people who actually did so.
Stories allow us to do just that. They are more important than you realize, without stories we would not even have a society. I can imagine some apes discussing stories the first thing after the language was discovered, “Hey did you hear about the time when Kyle ate those red berries and stopped moving? Maybe we should stay clear of that plant”. That is an example of experience sharing via stories. A lot of apes survived (except Kyle) because of that story.
Similarly, a lot of complex information crucial for the survival of society could be stored and passed on with the help of stories. They directly induce behavior without explaining logic behind it. Lying is bad, stealing leads you to hell, dying for your country takes you to Valhalla afterwards.
If we just listen to stories of others we might better be able to understand their pain, their experience, and where they are coming from. It is a tried and tested method after all. In other words, through stories we can see from someone else’s perspective, through stories we can get closer to becoming everyone, through stories we become the people of god (vaishnav jan)