When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument. The greatest religions convert the world through stories. The greatest stories are those that resonate our beginnings and intuit our endings, our mysterious origins and our numinous destinies, and dissolve them both into one. The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing. The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have its alternative possibilities. Human beings are blessed with the necessity of transformation. To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people. We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfils the dream in ways we couldn't have expected. Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger. | 
