Human beings are a storytelling species.

As much as we would like to believe that we are rational, scientific people who consider all the facts before acting, the truth is that our stories and the roles we play in them have a greater impact on our behavior.

Your family, past experience, and even your name are all part of the Story of who you are (or at least who you tell yourself you are).

We play many roles in different stories – husband, wife, co-worker, business partner, sibling, employee, boss, waiter, customer, father, mother, friend.

And it is each of these roles that has a far greater impact on our behavior. We also have another kind of Story, a collective Story that answers the question of who we are as a people.

The current Story of the people descends from the Newtonian, mechanistic World view. It says that we are each separate beings – separate from each other and from Nature.

Interacting through market transactions to maximize economic and reproductive self-interest.

In this Story, dolphins suffocated by oil spills, starving children, and ostracized homeless people does not affect us. How can it if we are truly separate from one another?

This belief that we are separate from one another is being challenged both by quantum science and our own intuition.

We know in our hearts that the World is supposed to be much more beautiful than what has been offered to us as normal.

As the old story of separation falls apart, a new Story based on the interconnected web of life is being born. This inviting video provides a glimpse at this new emerging Story.

As you watch it, try to feel the story through your heart and ask yourself if you are ready to believe in this Story.

The World we see around us is based on a story. Every culture has a ‘Story of the People’ to give meaning to the World. Part conscious and part unconscious, it consists of a matrix of agreements, narratives, and symbols that tell us why we are here, where we are headed, what is important, and even what is real.

Control, as we may or may not realize, is a key thread of the old story of humanity rising above nature, imposing technology and reason on the wild World and the uncivilized Human. All around us, we see our efforts at control backfiring: wars to fight terrorism breed terrorism, herbicides breed superweeds, antibiotics breed superbugs, psychiatric medications lead to explosive outbursts of violence.

The World was supposed to be getting better. We were supposed to be becoming wealthier, more enlightened. Society was supposed to be advancing. America, the most ‘advanced’ nation on Earth, yet even as financial wealth has doubled and doubled again in fifty years, has lost wealth of a more basic form; the social capital of feeling safe, feeling at home where you live.

Various visionary thinkers have offered versions of a new story, but none of them has yet become a true Story of the People, a widely accepted set of agreements and narratives that gives meaning to the World and coordinates Human activity towards its fulfillment. We are not quite ready for such a story yet, because the old one, though in tatters, still has large swaths of its fabric intact.

And even when these unravel, we still must traverse the space between stories, a kind of nakedness. In the turbulent times ahead our familiar ways of acting, thinking, and being will no longer make sense. We won’t know what is happening, what it all means, and, sometimes, even what is real. Some people have entered that time already.