This is a snippet from How to Build a Spaceship, the handbook to a course that combines Restorative Storytelling with collaborative intuitive practices. If you’d like to join the next cohort, add your name here.
In chapter two of the handbook, I introduce RS by way of celebrating the art of lying.
I’ve told some sweet lies in my day.
I’ve let loose some doozies that have had a big effect on me and those around me. In second grade I lied to my teachers and then parents about why I fell on the playground. What happened was that I was losing a running race so I fell in order to not look bad. The story I told my teachers, however, was that my legs didn’t work and that I needed my mother to come pick me up and take me home. This resulted in a trip to the emergency room where the doctors took every test (for muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, to name a few) and found nothing. It was thirty years before I owned up to my poor parents who worried I might have some very serious conditions.
I lied to my girlfriends. I lied to my teammates. I lied to bosses—lots of bosses. I have wondered about my morality and occasionally judged myself as a bad person, but now I see the whole dynamic differently. These lies were stories told for a specific purpose—to manipulate and control others. I told the lie to my parents so that I could get out of school for a day, and then maintained the lie so that my parents didn’t think I was a bad person. Some lies were to impress people. Some lies were to get out of trouble.
What interests me about this definition of lies (stories told to manipulate and control others) is that these stories can be factually true. You can tell lies that include measurable data that line up with the “facts” and yet the stories feel aggressive or even dangerous. Meanwhile there are stories that are clearly untrue, like fairy tales, that bring the listener a feeling of restorative nourishment. Santa is measurably untrue, but we will go to great lengths in our parenting, in our movie-making, and in our family mythology to validate the story. We feel a deeper and nourishing truth, even though the specifics are clearly false.
I grew up believing that Brook Shields was my sister.
The only measurable datapoint I could find to validate this belief was that we both had bushy eyebrows. Other than the one attribute, there was nothing to suggest we were related: nothing genetic, no family connection, no stories, nothing in anyone’s biography. And yet, I knew it. I knew she was my sister. And knowing she was my sister helped me. It was not true, but the story has brought me great solace over the years. I have a younger brother, but there were times in my life when I needed a sister and Brooke, as far as I was concerned, was there for me. I didn’t pick up the phone and call her—there was no number to call—but I had faith she was thinking of me and wishing me well. This was all I needed.
Over the years I would hear snippets of her life as a celebrity and I would shake my head. I’d tell myself that none of the rumors were true. The gossip about her relationships sounded silly. All the chatter sounded false. I’d catch pictures and headlines and my face would scrunch up into an expression of dismissiveness, because I knew the truth; my sister wouldn’t do that. My sister wasn’t like that. I knew the deeper truth and there was nothing the media, or my family could do or say to dissuade me from this deep knowing.
Brooke faded over the years and became like a sibling that was raised by another family. It felt like we were both adopted by different families and weren’t allowed to connect and know each other. I focused on my life and family and Brooke would pop into my consciousness from time to time and this would make me smile, but then I’d return my thoughts to what was before me. And then, a few years ago, she showed up in my Tailor’s Lodge.
Here's a little back story about the Tailor’s Lodge.
For decades, I had what I thought was a recurring dream, where the details were hazy. In this dream, there was a place I could go and meet with a group of men and meditate with them. It was a big dimly lit room, a lodge, and I got the impression that the room and this group was a part of a big secret. It felt like this was asubversive spiritual group, like a secret society, that would meet at night in an undisclosed location to meditate together. The room was always the same: a warehouse room with low ceilings where we would sit on tables, like tailors used to do in the old days. Eventually I referred to this community as the Tailor’s Lodge.
There were a few familiar faces: my high school social studies teacher was there, as was the dean of my college art school. There was a soccer coach. I recall a wealthy Israeli investor I met when I was working at a bakery. And then a few years ago, Brooke showed up. Up until this moment, it seemed to be a men-only club, but she came hovering in, sitting on her table, and she began to teach me about 5th dimension navigation and how to see the multiverse. Brooke Shields! Sitting on her tailor’s table, she was fierce, serious, and focused on teaching me these skills. Go figure. I actually started a series of stories about it.
So, was this the actual actress Brooke Shields who was teaching me 5th dimensional consciousness and the multiverse? I believe this is the wrong question. The measurable facts of Brooke Shield’s biography don’t matter in this story. What matters is that the story is real for me. I can feel the truth and the importance of the story in my life. Brooke was dear to me when I was a kid, so I trust her. That trust was pivotal in my ability to receive some far-out and complicated concepts. My story and consequently my version of Brooke Shields includes a familial bond that afforded a quality of trust that I did not have with anyone else in my biological family. I needed that trust and bond in order to be open to the information about the fifth dimension, and the arguable notion that this imagination wasn’t real is irrelevant.
There are so many stories in my past that I’m honestly not sure can be verified.
There is the story about the dog who scratched my lip and I got a face full of stitches, or the time I puked in the tea-cup ride at the State Faire or when my buddy Luke wheeled me around the emergency room in the Catskills on my 22nd birthday. My point is that I don’t think it matters what actually happened or who was actually there. These are stories that I know are true, in the same way that I know Brooke Shields is my sister or that I heard Santa’s sleigh on our roof when I was six. There is nothing to debate. Stories and faith, I believe, are the actual fabric of reality. Rules and laws do not govern my sense of what is real. Documentation or video proof will not sway me. Scientific articles or chemistry formulae will not convince me.
The formula that is at my core is: stories plus faith equals true.
Remarkably, the onset of artificial intelligence has been a boon to this relationship between faith and storytelling. Artificial Intelligence is currently able to write and tell stories, but the vibe feels “off”. These stories have a prepared cleanliness that feels like lies. There is a term in the robot development world called “uncanny valley” which describes the creepy feeling we get when we encounter a human-like robot that is almost convincing but not quite. The robot looks human but clearly isn’t. On a graph measuring human response to man-made items, there is a dip (the uncanny valley) in our feelings of security and serenity when we encounter something that is close to being human, but some of the details are “off”. This uncanny valley also applies to storytelling. We can tell when a robot is talking to us, but we are told that AI will continue to improve until its stories are indistinguishable from human created stories.
There are a growing number of projects like one considered by Meta which use AI to better understand and evaluate very human ideas like beauty. Again I think this is the wrong question. Wondering when AI is going to “nail it” puts storytelling on the robot timeline, rather than the human one. AI will only create stories that are built from what already exists, even when it is asked to create something new. AI composes stories from other stories. AI cannot leave the paradigm of creating things out of the material that lives on the internet. AI creates through the specificity of prompt development, and the resulting academic and constructive stories can be very useful.
With the proper prompt, AI can create a pedagogical story about a porcupine that teaches children how to navigate grief. With support through practiced prompt development, AI can land a perfectly accurate story that does the job, but it won’t be transformative in the way that a messy human story can be. It won’t be restorative. It won’t be healing. It won’t nourish because human generated storytelling is far more than the sum of its content. When a human being tells a spontaneous story, it is emergent and miraculous and flawed. It involves body language and vocality, presence and comportment. Futurists might like the idea of AI figuring all that out, but I don’t find that very interesting or useful. That would be like teaching AI and robots to taste my food for me; it doesn’t make any sense. Humans using AI to tell better stories doesn’t work because it makes the stories more robotic. I’m interested in human beings learning how to make their storytelling more human. I call this practice Restorative Storytelling because it restores us to our humanity.
This really resonates with me