How do stories capture the mental state?

Stories sometimes originate with specific ideas. But most times they just combine with other ideas of similar character and make a nice mixed-up entity. This mixed-up entity very closely resembles a fable or a myth and very few know what they mean. In fact because very few know what this mixed-up entity means, they are deemed similar to a myth or a fable. Dealing with this overall blurred entity casts a sharp filter onto all our actions. Deluded by this story we do not know what we are doing anymore. Everything seems to be a smog of ambiguity that never clears up. What is to be done? The situation seems like a compass performing a spin without seeming to be on the verge of calming down. In situations such as these there are two possible eventualities. Either you get used to blindly navigating the wonderland. Or you become a seeker of truth who cannot look beyond the delusions that have overpowered his/her senses anymore. Seeking has only one problem. The target: ‘what to seek’, is not well defined and often the medium is thought to be the replacement for it.

What is the medium? The teacher’s voice. The teacher is the guide, but end up becoming more than that. The teacher’s mental state is captured by his/her speech. Even for the teachers who do not try to develop a personal aura around his/her it develops on its own. When the teacher’s community of followers starts growing beyond a certain size just for the benign purpose of identification the teacher is forced to assume a personal role. If not willingly, to assume the qualities of a good leader, definitely. Stories now told or shared by the teacher after this point are done so through the teacher’s assumed voice. The teacher does not remain anonymous any more. The more the teacher wants to remain absent, the more present s/he becomes. This presence is intense, and is defined by the seeker’s questions as well as the teacher’s answers. The teacher’s intense presence gains intensity from audience’s investment of attention as well as the objective of avoiding confusion. A teacher who does not assume the absolute and exclusive truth in his/her public addresses will find that the audience needs surety as well as confidence in the teacher’s addresses to accept them.

Else the teacher as well his/her teachings will not be accepted. And this surely be a tragedy. As the popular adage goes — if confidence coincides with surety the world would be a different place. Seekers get more relief from their world actually changing in a small way than finding out that their world is destined to remain the same.
Here is where teachers and the confidence that they wear easily is effective. But pupils need not accept everything that the teacher professes. The only commitment that they have made is to process everything through their mind before accepting it as true.