Narrative / Story / Script
Definition:
The ongoing storyline consciousness weaves to make experience feel coherent.
At the individual level, the ego-tunnel creates a personal narrative of “me” moving through time.
At the collective level, shared stories form cultural, societal, or even global “ego tunnels.”
Nature:
Individual Narrative: Personal identity (“who I am,” “what happened to me,” “where I’m going”) built from memory, language, and belief loops.
Collective Narrative: Shared agreements, myths, and cultural scripts that structure group reality. Operates the same way as the individual story, but at a larger scale.
Both are provisional — stories consciousness tells itself to string together otherwise discrete frames of possibility.
Mechanics:
Cohesion: Narrative stitches each moment into a continuous flow, creating the illusion of linear time.
Belief Integration: Narratives feel stable when beliefs, emotions, and perceptions align. Contradictions surface as tension in the story.
Attention Hook: Stories capture awareness, reinforcing certain frames while obscuring alternatives.
Tuning: Shifting beliefs is not rewriting the story or changing the story of the past but rather retuning the timeline to a new narrative.
Metaphor:
Like a comic strip: each frame is complete in itself, but the mind creates a continuous storyline by linking them together.
Individual story = your panel-by-panel arc.
Collective story = the shared mythos of a whole anthology.
Note:
While collective narratives (politics, media, religion) can shape what feels “real,” the empowering move is always local: debugging your narrative. Once the prism of your story is seen through, collective ones lose their grip too.