The Untold Story

Printed in the Summer 2012 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Boyd, Tim. "The Untold Story" Quest  100. 3 (Summer 2012): pg. 84-85.

Tim Boyd
National President

I had an uncle, my favorite uncle, who died several years ago. Uncle John was a remarkable man in terms of his accomplishments in life, but more so because of his generosity of spirit and unconventional ways of thinking. As a student he worked long hours in very difficult circumstances to put himself through col­lege and then medical school. In his fifties he decided that family practice was no longer satisfying, went back to school for three years, and became what he had always been in his heart of hearts—a psychiatrist. He was the uncle that would take us fishing, show us how to build a bicycle, and tell us stories about his life and the things he had seen.

After years of hearing his array of stories, it got to the point that once a story started I knew where it was going. I had heard it all before, multiple times. For my brothers, cousins, and me, we could almost mouth the words—"this may be your fishing line, but it's my ocean," when he was recounting an angry fellow fish­erman's remarks about whose fish was at the end of their tangled lines; "pumping out oil and pumping in seawater has to affect the fault," spoken each time we passed the oil rigs near a break in the earth where the San Andreas fault surfaced on the way to Los Ange­les airport. What amazed me was, each time he told a familiar tale, how fresh it would be for him, as if it were the first time these words had crossed his lips.

Then there was a completely different category of stories he would tell—enigmatic stories. He would often recount incidents that we had been involved in together, drawing out the motivations of the various characters. These stories were more along the "call and response" line, where he requested and expected input, where the listeners would be called upon to remember not just the story line but their thoughts and motivation for the part they played. These were more challenging because they demanded a level of inner attention and awareness that often eluded me. As kids will do, we mostly just did things first and maybe thought about it later. Just to move things along, I often found myself nodding my head in agreement as my uncle talked.

All of this introspective participation could be a little demanding. After one of these sessions I would walk away feeling stretched and sometimes even a lit­tle unsettled, as if I had been reaching for something I could not quite grasp. These stories would end, but you never had the feeling that they were finished. No solid conclusion had been reached, and you were left with more questions than when they began.

Later in life I would encounter a letter written by the mystical poet Rainer Maria Rilke that put these story sessions into perspective.  

I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms, or books written in a very for­eign language. Don't search for the answers which could not be given you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer. 

Uncle John was a good storyteller, and whether it was the repetition of the stories and their themes or the poignancy of the stories themselves, much of what he said stuck with me into my adult life.

It has been a long time since those childhood days, and much has changed. One thing that has remained is that I still love a good story, well told. In fact my sense of the need and value of good stories has increased since I have become consciously involved in a spiritual path. When I think about the people that I have known who show signs of being touched by a higher con­sciousness, one of the qualities they all seem to have is a love of story. Much of the literature that forms the scriptural foundations for the world's spiritual tradi­tions are in large part storybooks—the Bible, Rama­yana, Mahabharata, Qur'an, Talmud. Why is that? What is it about stories that makes them so universally employed to communicate deep things?

Genuine spiritual teachers, now and in the past, encounter the same problem: recognizing the limits of language, how can we communicate something of the nature of the inner life? Lao Tzu, in the first verse of the Tao Te Ching, states that "the Tao [Truth or Way] that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." H.P. Blavatsky, in the proem to The Secret Doctrine, speaks of "an Omni­present, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable PRINCIPLE on which all speculation is impossible . . . It is beyond the range and reach of thought ... 'unthinkable and unspeakable.'" In the legends of Buddha's life, when he had his experience of enlightenment, he determined that the expanse of his realization could not be com­municated and decided that he would make no attempt to teach. Ultimately, Buddha, like other great teachers, took it upon himself to make the attempt. Much of that effort involved the symbolic language of story.

The beauty and the problem of stories that address spiritual realities is that they adopt familiar figures and relationships as symbols for deeper truths. Take the example of the first stanza from the Book of Dzyan: "The eternal parent wrapped in her ever-invisible robes had slumbered once again for seven eternities." We all know what a parent is; we know what robes are and what sleep is. So even though this stanza is addressing an utterly abstract phase of the unfoldment of the cosmos, before anything has come into being, we have some indication of the process. This is not some­thing that lends itself to the normal analytic turns of thinking, Stories of this type not only require a higher faculty for a proper understanding, but seem to call it out of us.

I have come to feel that the people who first told these stories, the great spiritual teachers, were not only wise but clever. They had a deep understanding of the human mind and its limitations, and developed  ways to address it. Many of the most profound stories are simple tales, much like the children's stories par­ents around the world recite to kids to fire their imagi­nations. Throughout history the great teachers have recognized that, in spite of our own inordinately high regard for our level of advancement, we are essentially a childlike humanity, filled with fears of the dark and unknown, and with a fascination for toys. And so they tell us stories that relieve our fears; they speak to us about divine parental figures; they give us toys, games, and costumes for religious performances; they tell us about other worlds and superhuman powers. As if we were climbing a ladder, they lead us step by step to a place where the rungs end, to a place that goes beyond storytelling to the untold story. Like the finger point­ing at the moon, the value of a deep story lies beyond itself. It demands from us a "leap of faith," an open­ing of the spiritual intuition. One of the great strengths of the Theosophical tradition has been its unwaver­ing focus on the importance of accessing the intuition. Regardless of our religious approach, or lack of one, genuine understanding begins somewhere past where normal thinking ends.

Within each of us there is a story waiting to be heard. It speaks about who we are and how we came to be. It speaks softly, its voice drowned out by the press of our daily concerns shouting their needs like a chorus in our minds—family needs, happenings at the job, bills to pay, places to go, people to meet. The cho­rus of voices calling for our attention can seem almost endless, but still our story whispers, and sometimes we hear a word or two. It is mostly hidden and for­gotten, but every now and then something spurs us to remember some fragment of it. When we do, we feel strong, whole. Like in so many tales about the hero's journey, after great struggles, for a moment we feel reunited with our lost love. This is the great value of story. To remind us of what we already know in our depths; to help us to remember; to quiet us so that the "still, small voice," the "voice of the silence" can once again be heard. Nothing new is added. Nothing has to be done. Only listen, and hear.