The World is Made of Stories

Book review: The World is Made of Stories, by David R. Loy.

David R. Loy combines buddhist and jungian approach to make a point: what we experience as the world that we know is crafted of stories that we were told and that tell ourselves.

The way he creates a narrative is very flowy: his thought jumps from one story into another, from a quote to a passage, from an observation to a line of a poem, and back to a story or a koan.

This is the world that he means: through this unabridged and spontaneous interaction with the readers, he invites us them to see what a narrative and a worldview can be: shaped by beliefs, quotes, thoughts, symbols and the wisdom of ancient sutras groomed in a way that makes a point.

In a spirit of showing how illusory the boundaries are (or, rather, how we define the boundaries ourselves), the book draws on both secular and spiritual sources, linear and spontaneous narration, notions of existence and non-existence.

Overall, I recommend this book as a source of liberation from constructs that have been in place before, that is, stories we were told, and a way to start flowing into new stories that construct a better kind of being-in-the-world.