Storytelling as a Spiritual Exercise

by Carme Magem

In fact, it is only his body that lives and has its residence in the state; his soul, however, holds all this to be puny and meaningless, and contemptuously wanders all over the place, “under the earth,” as Pindar says, and measuring whatever is on its surface, and “above the heavens,” observing the stars, and in general thoroughly investigating the nature of everything that is, but without lowering itself to the level of any of the objects in its vicinity.

Plato, Theactetus, 173c (this is Plato´s description of the philosopher, which, probably with roots in facts, sounds like a description of a shaman. Philosopher in this sense, simply means what the word means: a lover of wisdom. But it also depicts the exercise of a storyteller. Modern philosophers are so removed from this, that it only is the name they have in common). 

Primordial Meditation and the Philosophical Diary

You have travelled through a dark forest for a long time. You are a wanderer who are on a quest after the secret of life. You enter an old Inn filled with mystical books. One of them catches your eyes. It is wrapped in leather and covered with dust. You open it. It is filled with blank pages. It is the book of yourself, it is the book with the history of your soul. But you must write it yourself. It is your philosophical diary. 

If you sometimes decide to write down all thoughts, you will discover, that there happens something strange

If you from time to time, every day, decide to write down all thoughts, even the most banal and stupid, the shameful as well as the comfortable, then you will, how little it may succeed at first, soon discover, that there happens something strange.

Since you don´t have time to write each thought and feeling down, because you have something else to do, you discover, that somewhere in the consciousness, all thoughts and feelings are stored.

In spite of the fact, that you not directly use the whole of your awareness to write, you are nevertheless inner aware, and when you again have time to write, you discover, that what is kept in the consciousness, rises to the surface.

The thoughts and feelings are symptoms of something much deeper

The philosophical in the philosophical diary consists in being the writing-process itself, and the reading-process itself, present in passive listening.

When you in that way try to understand and feel it, you will then discover, that these thoughts and feelings are symptoms of something much deeper.

They are symptoms of time and its images themselves, and time is not only your personal history, it is also the collective and universal history.

You must become aware of how you react to the challenges of life

Relations can be seen as a philosophical sparring partner.

And this will be to use the communicative reason.

The relationship is namely a medium of self-exposure, because the relationship is to be. It is the actual life.

Without relationships we don´t live.

In order to be able to understand yourself you must therefore understand the relationship.

You must become aware of how you react to the challenges of life, and for instance write it down in the philosophical diary.

If you are the thought-process present in passive listening, the thought is understood as it is

We must, in order to understand our minds, slow down the speed of our thinking – not stop it – but slow the speed down in order to be able to study it, follow it to its outer limit.

A help to this is to keep philosophical diary.

If you are the thought-process present in passive listening, the thought is understood as it is.

And in this practice you are not self-assertive, desirous after power, after a name, after position.

You are what you are, simple and nobody.

Then the thinking no longer is self-producing, but self-forgetful. 

It is made transparent in being, and then you discover something beyond imagination.

The philosophical diary is not to keep a retrospective diary. It´s a spiritual practice

You know how to keep an ordinary diary; in the evening you write down all the incidents of the day, at the same time as you make considerations over them, evaluates them.

But to keep philosophical diary is not to keep such a retrospective diary, it is to write all thoughts - both positive and negative - down at the very moment as they arise.

Nor does it consist in trying to write profound and philosophical thoughts down.

The philosophical is lying in bringing a passive listening presence into the thoughtprocess.

The great philosophical thoughts will then begin to come by themselves.