Teaching stories shed light

Human beings learn best and remember best through stories.  If you hear facts they go in one ear and go out of the other. Stories on the other hand work on us on an emotional level. As I write this I’m watching President Obama arriving in Accra, Ghana.

This morning President Obama was talking about Africa in a press conference in Italy he started with facts and said that when his father came to the USA from Kenya the GDP (gross national product) of Kenya was the same as that of South Korea but Kenya did not move on whereas South Korea did. Boring!

Then he said that right now he has relatives living in Kenya who go hungry to bed each night. Now, that’s a story I’ll always remember. Point proved.

There is a long history of teaching tales within psychotherapies of ancient cultures.  Thus whether we look at the parables of Jesus, Zen and Sufi teaching stories or children’s fairy tales we find wonderful stories which amuse, delight and cause a sense of wonder and ultimately change us. 

One property of teaching stories is that like poetry they are multifaceted. Anyone who tries to tell you that these teaching stories have a single meaning is fooling himself or herself.

Let’s just examine the Mullah Nasrudin story of Mullah Nasrudin and the key.

Here the Mullah has lost his key and is looking for it in the street corner under a lamp post. Someone helps him and after half an hour when they don’t find the key the helper asks, “Are you sure you dropped your key here?”

Mullah Nasrudin replies, “Oh no, I lost it in my house inside.”

The friend says, “Why are you searching here?”

Nasrudin replies, “There’s more light here!”

On the superficial level this is a funny story and I think teaching stories which are humorous are preferred.

Now, when I use this story in one of my Transformative Imagination seminars I emphasize the word inside and sometimes explain that often we search for the key to our success outside ourselves when the key is within ourselves.

It is best to not explain teaching stories but allow them to affect your audience’s unconscious minds. So typically I mark the word inside by change of tonality.

I use the same story in seminars about technology to talk about how our tools often limit us as we search where the light is. I use the story for similar purpose when talking about physics. So often physicists interpret the result of experiments based on the “flash light” that is available.

In fact in the realm of physics this anecdote about deduction and cause and effect comes to mind:

Imagine a universe in which there are no cats and there’s a fence to another universe with a black cat. There is a slit in the fence and the physicists in the first universe observe the cat passing behind the slit. After many observation they notice the head always proceeds the tail (what they would see when the head and the tail pass behind the slit). So they say, “The head causes the tail.”

Now one day a dog chases the cat and so the cat runs backward behind the slit. The physicists in the first universe observe the tail proceeding the head this time and lo and behold they claim they have discovered “time reversal.”

I gave this to a friend with a PhD and he did not understand the relevance of the story. So perhaps I need to explain that again we look where the light is (cause and effect and deduction) on the other hand the reality may be more holistic (like the cat in the above story).

In fact some models of quantum mechanics (like that of David Bohem) have a more holistic approach and have influences moving back in time affecting events which may have happened billions of years ago from our point of view. I'll write about the delayed choice experiment later on and refer back to the above story.