Keepers of the Stories

Art by Kelly Louise Judd

Have you heard about the Keepers of the Stories?

The images in the movement of time is shattered reflections of the Great Vision of the Universe, and are background for, for example, the manifestation of the holy scriptures of India, the Vedas, which are claimed to have been ”heard” by wise men (the so-called Seers) in the dawn of time, and by word of mouth delivered over oceans of time. They are shadows, dreams, masks, mirrors, fables, fairy-tales, fictions: signs from Eternity. The Vedas therefore both include the most sublime and difficult available philosophy, as for example in the Upanishads, and good folktales as Ramayana and Mahabharata (with the famous Bhagavadgita), which with its clear ethical messages is told in village temples, to the children as bedtime stories, and which is inspiration for great poets as Rabindranath Tagore.

In his book, A Way of Being Free, the Nigerian poet and storyteller Ben Okri writes:

"The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, as old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled. They wrestled with mysteries and transformed them into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one more darkness, with eyes wide open and hearts set alight.”

In the dawn of time the future arised on the background of a negation-power, a great sacrifice, and an outgoing creative movement was started. In this outgoing movement, the Great Vision became, because of the negation-power, shattered in many images, which now become a kind of memories about the Great Vision; signs from Eternity. In this way, the past arised, and a longing back towards the origin, the unmanifested. And then a destructive back-movement was created.

Every withering flower is in this way a sign of longing.

This longing and back-movement are the background for the Keepers of the Stories.

Okri writes:

"The storyteller's art changed through the ages. From battling dread in word and incantations before their people did in reality, they became the repositories of the people's wisdom and follies. Often, conscripted by kings, they became the memory of a people's origins, and carried with them the long line of ancestries and lineages. Most important of all, they were the living libraries, the keepers of legends and lore. They knew the causes and mutations of things, the herbs, trees, plants, cures for diseases, causes for wars, causes of victory, the ways in which victory often precipitates defeat, or defeat victory, the lineages of gods, the rites humans have to perform to the gods. They knew of follies and restitutions, were advocates of new and old ways of being, were custodians of culture, recorders of change."

The Keepers of the Stories were Lovers of Wisdom, philosophers in the ancient sense. Philosophy as Storytelling is not the chase after a thought or an idea. It is all thinking´s essence, which is to go beyond all thought and feeling. It is, as Plotin said, the thinking´s journey back to its own ancient and pre-modern Source. Not until then philosophy is a movement into the unknown.

In his little book, Birds of Heaven, Okri writes:

Philosophy is most powerful when it resolves into story. But story is amplified in power by the presence of philosophy.

And, in A Way of Being Free:

"And I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties collapsing around us, and with no beliefs by which to steer our way through the dark descending nights ahead -- I think that now we need those fictional old bards and fearless storytellers, those seers. We need their magic, their courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a fractured, broken age that we need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We need them to be whole again."

Perhaps they are still here, the Keepers of the Stories?

To perceive what is truth there must be a total freedom from society, which means a complete cessation of acquisitiveness, of ambition, of envy, of this whole process of becoming. After all, our culture is based on becoming somebody, it is built on the hierarchical principle—the one who knows and the one who does not know, the one who has and the one who has not. The one who has not is everlastingly struggling to have, and the one who does not know is forever pushing to acquire more knowledge, whereas the man who does not belong to either, his mind is very quiet, completely still, and it is only such a mind that can perceive what is truth and allow that truth to act in its own way.

Maybe then you´ll meet them, the Keepers of the Stories.