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Communication is the only manifestation of human life. A machine can make pictures, prose, warnings, data, and tools. But only humans can make poems. I observe there can be no human life without the appearance of poetry. There cannot be life in perpetuity without perpetual cycles of communication. Eternity, then, is a grid of perpetual communication. This statement is a new thesis in philosophy. There is no eternal life without the element of eternal human poetic communication. Thus the poet is a vital element in human life.

I have found that communication is human life; not the act of metabolism in the cell. Animals have metabolism, and they are not men. Human life is not contained in red blood; life is communication with something other. As I have said, being can be described as intention of consciousness; the communication of this intention of life, this fact of consciousness, is personality. Personality is manifested only with communication. It is a perfect circle of being: intention, communication, personality, authority; a perfect circle of evolving infinite story. God and man are the act of communication, making, in each moment, and eternally, the phenomena of life. This is the Chandos Grid. God and man appear in the Grid.

This is crucial in my concept. If we want to understand life, then we must examine the cunning of communication. If we want to explore the possibilities of eternal life, then first we should understand the mechanism of the story grid. Story is the only form of communication in the human idiom. This idiom is voiced by poets, not philosophers.

My discovery is Story Theory. I insist that all human story is communicated by incantation poetry, first appearing in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This poem proves the immortality of the soul – by other means. I do not consider this event a coincidence. Story always arrives deliberately at the crossroads of the human. As god-makers, we are still Egyptians.

All gods and philosophy, all story and religion, are found in texts with words that appear as incantations. The reader will demand why I make continual reference to the word “god”? First, I am not afraid of the word, as I want to know what the word means. So far that is mere intellectual honesty. Or is it more honest to reject our struggle with this word with disgust, instead ignoring its existence? Second, it is not the writer that is obsessed with god; it is Western literature that is obsessed with god. The word “god” is found in every text of Western story. If my thesis is based on clear patterns of Western story (literature, legend, history, art, politics), as it does, then I am forced to address the god concept. These are honesties worthy of the reader’s intelligence. God appears in the grid of Western texts.

Then, where do the gods come from in the West? I insist that you may as well ask where man comes from. I am deeply convinced that man exists. If I exist then I also god-make. I use “god” as a verb here since our action of making story is the manifestation of our sense of god. Actually we make a story of value, of joy – and god falls out every time. We are so made that we can only focus on what gives us joy, hope, and frenzied pleasure. If our literature is a guide, this is how the human code operates. I do not disparage joy wherever it is found; I merely insist that being human is the act of making god. God is our word for the existence of joy, of unbounded, unlimited hope. Joy is searched for, and thus the word “god” (the authority of joy) can be found in all of Western story. Named or unnamed, god is the will to joy principle in Western Literature. If our story can give value to our life, and this life delineates an ethics, then the authority for this projection of joy is what we invest in the god-personality. This is how I read and translate the appearance of god in Western literature. I insist that any creation of personality is an attempt to make god, in so far as this god is a search, and a mandate, towards joy. Personality is the fabric connecting god and man.

The thesis of this narrative is that all qualities, all forms of good and evil, originate from story. Show me your good, or your evil, and I will show you the story where your species of good or evil originated. All concepts, all reality – every value that has ever existed – has a textual reference to a story. This should not be such a surprise to the reader. Yet it comes compete as a surprise to all thinkers I confront with this concept. They shift and stumble uncomfortably for a few minutes – and then grow very quiet after I help them to consider a few examples in their mind.

Christianity cannot exist without the Gospel stories. A preacher cannot forbear to quote Paul at least once in any sermon from the pulpit. Judaism cannot exist without the Torah. Islam cannot exist without the Koran. And this is only the beginning of this human phenomenon. It never stops. There is nothing that does not exist apart from story. Not a design, not a building, not a tool, not a technology, not a politician, not a parent, not a clown that does not have direct reference to the mechanism of human story. There has never been a human being that did not have a story. Never.

The text is the authority for everything that forms what is human. Egyptian gods are found in the text (Book of the Dead). Yahweh is found only in the text (Torah). The Olympic gods are found only in the text of poets (Homer and Hesoid). Allah is found only in the text (Koran). The Christ story is found only in the text (Gospels). There is a pattern here that has been utterly overlooked in our civilization. The gods who had no text soon died away. The Druids are gone. God exists first in literature, then at the end of sword in the power projection of Empire. Mohammed called Christians, “the people of the Book.” I do not agree that this human phenomenon is a mere accident of the technology of writing. There is “something” in this space filled by the word of “god”. I do not know what “god” is. I know only the story I accept of god. Whatever it is, men sense that value exists in this space; this phenomenon gives a direct clue to man’s condition and his code. I do not overlook this phenomenon. God can be traced to the discovery of our consciousness in the story we make of consciousness.

God is merely the word that we assign for the human insistence on joy or meaning. Meaning from phenomenon and chaos is the only product of literature. Meaning (personality) is the result of story. Thus story contains all human meaning, reality, and interpretation of consciousness. Story is the source document of what is human and maps the cycles of our quests for the human personality. My product is not a scholarly and exhaustive explication of the old texts; my product is a counter-story and the language contained in Chandos Ring.

I have examined the uses and meaning of incantation language that is joined with the powerful story-making mechanism in the human personality. Western thinkers in the Western tradition have overlooked this phenomenon. These texts are poems; they are elegies, lyrics, epics, laments, histories, gospels, fairy tales, fables, legends and every science theory that ever existed. In fact, these stories of man are the only authentic clues of our nature and our existence, just as they pretend. The missing link in the modern mind is the realization that everything in consciousness is story. What unites all these discoveries of the human personality is what I call incantation poetry.

Poets, in each god-making story, used a specific language to express the great discoveries of human personality. The God-stories are immensely strange. Our consciousness is immensely strange. Our consciousness, in fact, appears unaccountable. But alien strangeness does not hold us back from making a story of consciousness. We never will know the personality that wrote the Book of the Dead. We still don’t know the names or the personalities of the poets of the Torah. We still don’t know the name or personality of the actual poets of the Gospels. We still don’t know who wrote the Shakespeare canon (it certainly was not a man identified as Shakespeare, esq.). We don’t know whom the poets were that wrote the Iliad and Odyssey. In fact, we don’t know the name or personality of any of the great world-making poets. Not a single poet of the Western world-making canons has a sure biography. All we have is the stories these poets made of man’s quest and god’s personality. On the surface of things, it is all strange and unaccountable. Poetry is the arrival of the strange.

I call this cunning language, this technology, incantation poetry: a means to knowing by flash representation of authority. I insist from my own experience that all intense insight comes from flashes of story, crucial moments of vision – not from reason, selfish interest, random chemical causation, stomach gas, or logic. I call these flashes of insight, incantation. Incantations are not only poems; they also perform as flash inspirations in all categories of representation – music, science, technology, painting, design, fashion. Wherever there is clarity of human personality there is incantation.

Einstein, for example, had a flash of insight in a new story of the physical universe. He described it as a flash insight. He spent the rest of his life working out this original incantation. The result was the new story of physical matter in the material universe. Einstein at no point addressed the story of the soul of man – that was a separate flash developed by a separate man. The mechanism of incantation, at the very least, points to a trail of origins beyond the human rational experiment. At some moment all stories were originally a brief flash in the brain. This is what men have meant by the word “idea”.

The list of examples is long of famous scientists who discovered their greatest concept in their dreams. I may mention briefly, Mendel and Mendeleev. The ideas that occurred to them in dreams became the most structural and important concepts of atomic theory perfectly fitted into the periodic table and genetic theory, respectively. In the end, all scientific discoveries are perfectly refined stories from the imagination.

I saw a recurrent problem in my work. I found incantations that assumed a change in the way the Western world explained itself. It did not require a new plot; it required a new logos of personality. Neither Homer, nor Virgil, nor Dante, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton invented plots. Their language was the sole agency of personality. Imaginative human personality was created from language, not from plots. This is why historical reality, what “actually” happened, is irrelevant in story. The translation of human events comes from language. Language thus becomes what is recognized as human. Story then, is language, and the strange quantities of language – not plots.

I do not recognize plots. A story is the revelation of character, how a personality moves and develops, not a plot. A reader never finds a new plot in poetry. Homer, Virgil, or Shakespeare never invented new plots; they took the plots of other men and created human personality from language. A poet has a powerful code that allows him to perceive a voice that outlives his own personality. We do not know where this code originates. I had to study my own imperfect work. For many years my work was utterly flawed, because I could never place it in the context of my prior concept of Western Culture. There was a strange, new voice that came out of this tension. Gods always enter our space holding something strange. I can only create the language for this new world. The proof will follow the sound.

I discovered that there is no human conceptualizing, no thinking, no philosophy, without first the agency of story. I discovered that all the quality and personality of humans come from story. I sought a richer and more imaginative logos for the way we live our lives. I decided that secular and religious story has not advanced to the level of our actual imagination or achievement in the West. The critical mind will observe that the West’s most casual ideas are set to conquer the known universe. The earth will certainly destroy us; we must escape from the earth. We were fashioned to escape all confinements. We are mobile creatures.