Your POV is powerful.

We need not weep because the POV cannot generate its own inspiration. Not at all. It’s actually quite useful that most of the time, our POV doesn’t know why we want what we want and why we need what we need. (Want and need are, by the way, the same thing at the fundamental level. The POV may not know this, but the storyteller knows that what we need is exactly what we want, and what we want is exactly what we need. It’s a matter of alignment.)

The existence of a storyteller means that there is something enveloping us that makes most of the decisions in life for us:

• The storyteller is the power that heals our wounds without us having to stitch together each cell consciously, one by one.
• It is the power that makes our hearts beat while we sleep.
• It is the power that shapes our dreams—and in the same way, shapes the thing called “reality.”

And a storyteller needs a story to tell.

How is a story told? Through a character—in this case, the avatar. So, fundamentally, the storyteller, POV, and avatar cannot be severed from each other. (Please also refer to “On the distinction between "imaginary" and "real." I mentioned that wrist/forearm/elbow are useful concepts, but it doesn’t mean that they can be cut apart from each other if we still want them to function. You want a whole arm, not wrist/forearm/elbow separately.)

Imagine a novel. In there, the character runs around, doing things. The character has a POV. Where does the POV come from? From the storyteller of that novel...

…although, to a character who doesn’t truly know where it comes from (its true origin; not its biological origin, such as its parents and culture within the story), it may seem as if the POV came from somewhere else.

But we know—we, the people outside of the novel—that someone wrote that story: the storyteller. The storyteller is everything in the story: the character, the plot, the background… everything. At the same time, the character is the storyteller. And when the former taps into the power of the latter, the former can also be the plot, the background… again, everything.

Back to this idea: a storyteller needs a story to tell.

The storyteller isn’t “better” than the POV, the avatar, and anything else that makes up the story. In fact, the storyteller needs and wants all those elements.  We might even argue that it’s the storyteller (like a novelist) who is dependent on the avatar (like a character), more than the other way around.

Let’s consider that idea and really experience it. Really consider what happens when a novel isn’t written.

In the case of the character: nothing happens. The character never was, because the novel never was. The character isn’t going to weep because it never existed, because it actually never existed! It’s neither good nor bad for a novel character to not exist.

Meanwhile, in the case of the novelist: if she ever wants to experience anything through a novel, she’d better write a novel.

The avatar world is both limiting and freeing for the storyteller. Because of the limits, specific things can be experienced. And that is freeing. The avatar is the channel through which the storyteller can experience that limiting and freeing avatar world.

So, we need not feel powerless at all. We are the avatar, and at the same time, we are connected to the storyteller. Consider how much of the world unfolds automatically for us. The storyteller loves and adores us.

In fact, it seems that most storytellers love their avatars more so than most avatars love and adore their storytellers. Recall that the avatar and its POV can reject the inspiration that the storyteller sends. The avatar is so free to do that, that the avatar can deem the storyteller nonexistent, much like a novel character who denies the existence of a novelist. A novel will function perfectly fine without the character’s conscious acceptance of a novelist. Most novels that aren’t intentionally meta function this way.

When we, in this avatar world, do not contemplate what drives us (sends inspiration to our POV), we are like a character in such a novel.

When we, in this avatar world, start knowing who we are (that we are part of the storyteller; that we are the storyteller), we start becoming like a character in a meta novel: a novel about a novel. We start becoming a character who writes its own story.

The worldview tag is best read in this order. The later posts build on the earlier posts.