We have story telling deeply ingrained in our culture. It stems from our greatest asset, our communication skills - speech.
Speech works through assigning symbols, words, to events, things, concepts and to our dreams. Other people need to have an understanding of the words that matches ours.
As others perception of reality is different to our own it can only be a partial mutual understanding. For many things and actions we use words where the meaning is closely shared - chair, dog, sleep, walk. Actually, do we mean a brisk walk to the station, a stroll through the park or perhaps the action of lifting one foot, tilting the body as the foot moves forwards, lowers, takes the body's weight as the other foot lifts, moves forwards and so on.
Meaning is changing and relative. What is happening is happening whether it is explained or not.
We seek comparisons though for more complex situations - the stuff of philosophy, ethics, science, faith, emotions and behaviour that is unexpected, not being met with a smile by an acquaintance, being shouted at by a stranger and so on.
In each situation we seek and we crave meaning. There may be meaning but it may not be needed by us. It doesn't matter why a stranger chooses to shout at us but we want to know why. Even if something that is just the result of a series of events that has not previously been in our awareness happens to us we seek a meaning - was it our bad luck? Birds eat, birds fly, birds shit and it lands on you. That is the explanation, its not luck.
In seeking meaning to explain (away) an event or feeling or a reality we use metaphors and stories as comparisons. We crave a simple link between actions by way of comparisons. The story of x gives us an insight into the thing y that is happening to us now.
We use comparisons in understanding our place in the universe, our changing position is time and space and the probabilities that flow through and around us. Just like that, creating a metaphor of "flow" - we want to see probability in our mind's eye as a flow, perhaps if we could just see it as a series of ever changing winds and currents that shape our progress through life.
But, its not like that. Science seeks and uses metaphor to reduce the sheer complexity of the detail of life and the cause and effect relationships that interplay with each other.
Reduce it to a manageable, palatable, series of linear events. There are causes and effects; some are very direct. Where though we blind ourselves to awareness is seeking to make sense of the world around us with comparative stories whose links to the situation to they seek to bring meaning to are stretched and creaking.
The very telling of the stories becomes religion and immersion in them becomes faith.
Rather than offering the meaning they satisfy a craving for both meaning and mystery. They say we are both small in the universe but that we are everything. Both of which are crap - we are collections of chemicals and processes that move about and process events. We are lots bigger than many things and lots smaller than many. We are made of molecules, we run chemical/biological processes, we are born, live, reproduce, die, rot turning continually from molecules into a coalescence of "us" and back into a separation of molecules.
The stories, the explanations, the allegories are so often masking from us the ability we have to encounter the world as it is, for us, just now. Craving meaning is a route to endless hunger - as a man searching in a desert will always find, the belief that his god will guide him to food is crap. He is either near enough to food and going in the right direction or he will starve.
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