The Template For All of Our Stories Part I

Jesus, Neal Cassidy, Breaking Bad, Villains and A Savior

From the beginning of history, mankind has told stories.

We find them in primitive etchings scratched into the walls of ancient caves. Across a million homes tonight, mother and fathers will gather their young in their arms and read together tales of pirates and wizards and little fuzzy unicorns. Couples will settle down on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and Netflix and chill to a love story.

The need for story is written into our DNA. All day, all night, stories play through our minds, like an old cassette tape on loop. We dream them. We invent and create unique ones that we own. We ingest other’s and analyze them, accepting or rejecting them. Our life is one giant story, blending unique and authentic with borrowed and adopted.

There are many types of stories, told in different and unique ways.

There’s the love story. The drama. The thriller. The redemption story. The underdog story. The heist and getaway. The war story. The horror story. And of course, the dystopia.

The really good stories, the stories I love, are the epics like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and The Avengers. They are filled with danger, defeat, betrayal, risk and reward, incredible darkness and overwhelming light. Pain and glory. Redemption. Vanquishing of evil and the conquest of the righteous. Victory.

It’s become clear to me just how very few original stories there are to tell though. At this point, Hollywood feels just like some tired retread. I used to joke that there are really only 7 scrips in Hollywood, just done different ways. Yet the more I see what they’re churning out, the more accurate that might be.

Right now, we find ourselves in a story that’s more real than anything Hollywood could dream up. Each day, it seems like the stakes get higher. The bad guys get worse and more numerous. Darkness continues to spread into every crack it can find. Light and truth are increasingly snuffed out. The masses are continually divided and subjugated, and tyrants gather increasing power.

It’s almost like all of the fictional epics we love were a template, a foreshadowing, of what we’re currently living through. Brief but detailed glimpses of the reality that you and I must face.

As I write this, Russian military is rolling across Ukraine. Covid continues to be a boogeyman under the bed for many people. The name “Trump” still terrorizes millions. China is gearing up for a probably takeover of Taiwan, and then who the frig knows. Pretty sure they already own all of our colleges and the minds of 1/3 of US citizens.

And all though these particular scenarios are new, the fact is events like this have transpired before, across time and locations, since the first humans started roaming to and fro.

I’ve previously written that the Enemy isn’t new or particularly original in how he operates. He has a script, a game plan, and once you understand the basics, it’s pretty easy to see through the smoke and mirrors that are required to make us believe his lies.

But enemy is only one side of the equation. A good story requires a hero as well as a villain. Sure, you can even have an anti-hero, which is a character you don’t even really like. Walter White of Breaking Bad might be the greatest anti-hero of all time. But you have to have someone or something to root for. A yin vs a yang, even if who you’re rooting for feels a little like the same side of a coin. Opposition and tension are a must in any story that makes you feel something.

Walter White (aka Heisenburg)

The villain must present a threat to the ideal world. The ideal world is the preferable order of the universe the characters are living and existing within. Paradise - or simply the status quo - must be put in danger, and as the danger rises and the stakes become higher, there must be a resolution. Salvation and redemption and a return of justice, righteousness, and order are the preferred end, the completion. Some stories don’t have that as the end, and how does that feel?

Most of the ancient epics that have formed our cultures over time - the Greek and Roman gods; the Epic of Gilgamesh; Pangu; Vishnu and the Hindu gods; the Bible, just to name a few, have many similar elements that explain creation, destruction, redemption, and restoration.

They have heroes and villains, life and death, miracle and disaster, pleasure and pain. These are the original origin stories, written across thousands of years and millions of miles. Everything we have today - Star Wars, Avengers, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, to name a few - simply take their cue from these precursors.

How can it be, that over that time and space, there are such similar elements? Could it be that within humanity, buried somewhere deep within our DNA, there really is a master script? One true plot that we all instinctively know?

It would be easy for us here and now to write that idea off. Most of us have access to all of this knowledge, all of these stories. We have Netflix and houses of worship and a library within a mile of where we’re sitting right now.

But again, how is it that the ancients, living vastly different lives, epochs apart, all echo such a similar story?

I’m probably going to lose some of you here, but I believe the answer to that question is Jesus Christ. In fact, I’m willing to stake my life here and in the next on that belief. Yes, it’s faith. Yes, I can’t fundamentally prove what I’m about to say. But in this life, if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything, and after devoting the greater part of my life to finding something to stand on, this is where I land.

If Jesus was a real person and the Gospels can be verified historically, then there is an onus on each of us to determine the following: was he a crazy person? A liar or charlatan? Or was his who he said he was?

If he is who he says he was, then when he says things like “I am THE way, THE truth, and THE life. No man comes to the Father but by me”, that puts everyone who hears this in a position to make a decision. We can ignore that and write it off. Or we can explore it and believe it.

And if we believe it, this gives us the lens to see this life in a way that explains so many gaps and mysteries. Does it explain everything? Not by a long shot. Nothing in this life fully will. That’s the price of being limited and mortal. We will always be left with an aspect of being creatures of faith, regardless of whether we put our faith in science, technology, our fellow man, a higher power, or something else.

If we can accept that, or even entertain it here for the sake of argument, then it validates multiple cornerstones essential to understanding our reality, including:

• The stories of the Torah (paradise, paradise lost, the creation of law and government, economics, etc.)

• The validity of much world history written about over thousands of years through the Old Testament

• The reality of an enemy, of true evil

• The reality of a Savior

• The ability to hope for a universe and systems that eventually will make sense

The implications of this are staggering.

Aldous Huxley said “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Many have found that cleansing the “doors of perception” come through psychedelics or meditation or music. Others, that cleansing comes through extreme activity, like martial arts or mountain climbing.

These can and do lead to a cleansing of your reality. I’ve found clarity and vision in many of these, specifically psychedelics and athletics. I’ve pushed myself hard at work and in life, and each time I really push, really go beyond my comfort zones, I feel like I’ve “leveled up”, just a bit more. I’m cleansing my doors.

Yet nothing and no one has given me the eyes to see quite like seeing through the eyes and message of Christ. It goes far beyond religion. When you start to really consider some of the implications above through this lens, reality takes on an entirely new weight and scale. It becomes much like sitting in the seat at the eye doctor, and they move those different lenses, asking “is it more clear here? Or here?”

So there’s my full disclosure. These lenses have lead me to some really profound truths and exciting possibilities, and one of them is this belief that all of our stories come from this eternal drama of God and Satan, good and evil, death and salvation. The Christ story IS the archetype for all of our other stories.

The more I see it, the more the world around me makes sense. The world is chaotic and confusing and FILLED with far too many distractions. The amount of noise that we have here and now is literally mind-boggling. The amount of information we are constantly ingesting is unprecedented. Without the right lenses, without an archetype story, there’s no chance for any of us to navigate through this sea of noise.

I used to be kind of a hippy in my college years. I did a lot of psychedelics, smoked a lot of pot, listened to a lot of Grateful Dead. Read a lot about the beat poets and the Merry Pranksters and the hippies. I wanted to just go back in time to Haight-Ashbury and breathe that air.

One of the most fascinating aspects of that time were the Merry Pranksters, particularly a guy named Neal Cassidy. Neal would drive this big old school bus full of hippies tripping their heads off on acid. Including himself. He would trip and drive across the country and snort amphetamines.

One of the things that always fascinated me about old Neal was something he said. When he would talk about how he could possibly drive with that much distraction, with that many drugs in his system, he would say something like

“You just have to drive through the distractions and see past all the bullshit. There’s the reality of the road, and then there’s all the fantastic and unnecessary. Focus on the road.” (my approximate quote)

I think he meant that about while he was driving the bus but also very much about life in general.

If there’s no clear road ahead, then we’re in for all sorts of trouble. We might not even realize we’re driving. We have a head full of hallucinations and distractions and noise. It’s night, and we have the music up way too loud.

But if we acknowledge there IS an archetype, a roadmap, then we can drive forward, even when the road is foggy or there doesn’t seem to be an exit. And if we acknowledge that, then we begin to see the clues EVERYWHERE.

In Part 2, we’ll dive a little further into what this means to us personally. Stay tuned. In the meantime, remember there’s a road, it’s real, the distractions and hallucinations are secondary, and drive on through it all.