Why Do Sapiens Generate "Stories"? | Earth Folklore OS: A New Framework for Perception [Definition Document]

Why do Sapiens generate "stories"?
That question grew larger the more I traveled.

Walking through Tokyo.
Walking through Taiwan.
Walking through London.
Walking through Chicago.
And walking through Suwa.

Every time I walked through a land, I felt a sense of unease regarding human activities.

Why did such beliefs emerge in this place?
Why do people pray to mountains?
Why do people pray to a single tree?
Why do people enshrine stones, continue festivals, and keep carving "stories" into the land?

What I wanted to know was neither myth nor history.
It was that moment when a "story" emerges.

Tourism teaches us "what to see."
History teaches us "what happened."
Folklore studies teach us "what kind of beliefs existed."
Geology teaches us "why the terrain became that way."
All of these are important, and all of them are necessary.

However, none of them
"Why did that story emerge from that land?"
answered that question. I wanted to know that moment.

So, I arrived at a hypothesis.

In the world, there are many excellent lenses of knowledge, such as geology, hydrology, ecology, folklore, anthropology, mythology, architecture, and history.
It is not that any of them are wrong.
Rather, they are all correct.
It is just that each one illuminates a part of the world.

To read the Earth, a single academic discipline is not enough.

What did ancient people see? What did they fear? What did they believe in?

Why did they stop in that place?
Using that sense of unease as a clue, I traverse existing knowledge.

For that purpose, a framework of perception was built within myself.
That was Earth Folklore OS.

So, what is this OS?
If I were to put what I am thinking into a single diagram, it would look like this.

What this diagram shows is not a new academic discipline, but the relationship between a "question" and existing disciplines.

Earth Folklore OS is not trying to create a new academic discipline.
It is not a replacement for folklore studies.
It is not a denial of geology.
It is also different from history.
Its role is different from existing disciplines.

It traverses existing disciplines,
"Why did that story emerge from that land?"
It is an OS for exploring that question.

Academic disciplines are lenses for viewing the world.
Earth Folklore OS is an OS for connecting those lenses together
and integrating them into a single perception.

So, how does this OS read the world?

I go on a journey and stand in a land.
First, I feel a sense of unease.

From there, I look at the geology.
I look at the water.
I look at the ecosystem.

Eventually, a "liminal space" is born in that land, and people give it a "story."

That story becomes a system, is carved into the body, and accumulates into the cognitive world.
I have organized this flow into seven layers.

L1 Geology
L2 Water
L3 Ecosystem
▲ LIMINAL
L4 Story Layer
L5 System/Infrastructure
L6 Embodiment
L7 Cognitive World

This is not merely a classification.

It is the very process by which a "story" emerges from between the Earth and Sapiens.

Therefore, Earth Folklore OS is not an OS for reading myths.
It is an OS for reading the moment when a "story" emerges.

With this OS, I
walk through lands all over the world.

Every time I walk, this OS is also rewritten.
It will probably never be finished.
Even so, I want to keep asking.

Why did this story emerge in this land?

With that question, I head to the next land.