A passage from the poet Wallace Stevens (1989) has guided me for many years in my understanding of both religion and depth psychology: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly” (p. 189). These words are not as radical as they may sound at first. You just have to accept that everything we say is colored by the limits of our understanding, our emotional biases, and our hopes and wishes. Imagination shapes everything we say and think. Whenever we tell the stories of our lives, we are all novelists. In his book Healing Fiction, Hillman (1983) went further. He said that therapy offers the opportunity to opt into a better fiction, tell a more advanced story about your life.

Basically I agree with the view that writing novels is an unhealthy type of work. When we set off to write a novel, when we use writing to create a story, like it or not a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity rises to the surface. All writers have to come face-to-face with this toxin and, aware of the danger involved, discover a way to deal with it, because otherwise no creative activity in the real sense can take place.

I am open to critiques of course, if they are offered in the spirit of collective liberation. Staying focused on our foundational miraculous nature is actually very hard work in our modern culture of deconstruction. We are socialized to see what is wrong, missing, off, to tear down the ideas of others and uplift our own. To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses. So I am open to hearing what doesn’t work about this book, as long as you promise to stay open to what does work.

Octavia Butler, one of the cornerstones of my awareness of emergent strategy, spoke of the fatal human flaw as a combination of hierarchy and intelligence. We are brilliant at survival, but brutal at it. We tend to slip out of togetherness the way we slip out of the womb, bloody and messy and surprised to be alone.

I read sci fi and visionary fiction as political, sacred, and philosophical text, and I engage with others who read it that way. I spent the first part of my life learning what history’s victors wanted to tell me to believe about the past, including the simple assumption that it was the past. I see massive patterns of violence and inequality in history, which perpetuate

in the daily news. Science fiction, particularly visionary fiction, is where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior. While I have done deep dives in the work of Samuel Delaney, Ursula Le Guin, and others, I started this scholarship in earnest with Octavia.