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"Origin Stories" Introduction

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Written by Shaun Johnston Shaun Johnston

Published: March 2, 2018 March 2, 2018

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Our bodies have been evolving for billions of years. They've become magnificent. But conscious human nature is only a few centuries old, maybe a few thousand years. It's probably still primitive compared to how amazing our bodies are. Can we "consciously" improve it?

I start with origin stories. I like to think of them as like rafts, and imagine all of our conscious human nature growing out of them. I know most of our beliefs don't seem connected to origin stories, but what if they are? Then every belief we have could actually imply something about us, about our basic nature, about how we are made and where we came from. That's an origin story. Then we can think about how to improve human nature in terms of origin stories.

To explore this idea I interview people. Whatever they believe about themselves, and about other people, we'll try to trace back to one origin story or another. If we're lucky, that'll turn up some new origin stories we weren't actually conscious of. They could reveal possibilities in human nature we'd never thought of before.

The story we start with is, we were delivered to our parents by a stork. Then we see what that implies. For example, suppose you say you have a guardian angel. Then I'll ask, did you get that angel from the stork? Or did you already have it before, from someone else? From God? If you say, no, then I'll ask you... And so we'll work back to where our gifts come from, and see if there are any more wonderful talents there that we could add to what we've already got.