THE STORY

"It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we are in-between stories. The Old Story - the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it - sustained us for a long time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose, energized action, consecrated suffering, integrated knowledge, and guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children.
But now it is no longer functioning properly, and we have not yet learned the New Story." Thomas Berry, 1978

http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC12/Gilman1.htm Stories, Facts and Meanings. Very insightful paper: Quote

"THE BASIC STORIES A CULTURE TELLS ITSELF - about the world and life - can't be just anything, for these stories are the gatekeepers of awesome responsibilities, of life and death. To be effective, these stories must go beyond either reportage or fiction to be the culture's best expression of ultimate reality and wisdom.

To do this, these stories must combine two fundamental qualities. They must be believable and they must be empowering. To be believable, they must be based on the best information available to the culture. To be empowering, they must go beyond just information to provide answers to, or at least a framework for answering, basic questions about the meaning and purpose of life...
One of the most fundamental causes of the instability of our present culture is the deep split between our best factual information about the world (obtained primarily through the sciences) and our traditions that have focused on questions of meaning (religion/philosophy/spirituality)."
Go to link for reading this paper.

Read David Sprangler link on home page. Quote -"We recognize that in the power to tell a story lies the power to shape our reality, to alter our perceptions, to create new worlds of experience. It is, in fact, a god-like power, one that can affect and change consciousness (which modern physicists tell us may be the ultimate reality after all). If, as St. John says, in the Beginning was the Word, then the Story followed directly after, unfolding the universe from the imagination of God. In emulation of the divine, we have sought to duplicate that moment of creation by being storytellers, too."

This paper tells what it means to be an interactive storyteller, a creative participant.