“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” – Muriel Rukeyser

Sometimes we need a timeless story with an expansive perspective in order to step out of the immediate dilemmas, conflicts, worries, and hopes of our daily lives, and step into living from a bigger picture.

I want to invite you to understand ancient stories and teachings as symbolic and mythological as much as literal. Because if you don’t have a sense of the symbolic and mythological, then you take whatever it is—the Vedas, the Buddhist texts, the Bible, the Quran—completely literally. Joseph Campbell—the great mythological historian—says doing this is a complete confusion of levels.

Like, in the Bible it says, “A rich man is less likely to go to Heaven than a camel pass through the eye of the needle.” It turns out the Eye of the Needle is the name of a small gate in the wall that surrounds Jerusalem; it’s not about a needle at all. It has a different origin. It’s not about needles and gates, it has some other meaning—just like Moses and the burning bush.

If you read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—Annie Dillards remarkable nature book—she writes about the day she saw the tree with the lights in it. She said she would walk on her knees across the desert for hundreds of miles to see that tree one more time. It doesn’t mean that the bush was burning or the tree was on fire, but what it means is that we have the capacity to see this world in an illuminated way—to see the magic of the bay trees, and the oaks with the sunlight on them sparkling, and to realize that every tree is life growing in new directions and putting itself out there, drinking in the sunlight and being part of this fabric. Through this lens, we experience the mystery and the magic of it all.

So it is important to understand these ancient stories not just as historical. We keep telling them because they resonate in a different way in the heart and mind—a symbolic and mythological way.

This is a excerpt from my new course: Stories That Awaken Your Heart and Transform Your Life