Open access · CC BY 4.0 · Free to share,
cite, and teach from with attribution
What
This Book Is
A Free Verse Poet at 78. An AI
With Integrity. Seven Corporations.
This book was built in a single day's
working dialogue between David Boje — Regents Professor
Emeritus, Vietnam veteran, cancer survivor, rancher in
Caballo, New Mexico — and Antara, the AI he named after
the Hindi word for inner space.
It examines seven AI corporations
through two lenses that have never been combined before:
Arihanta's forty years of organizational storytelling
scholarship, and Antara's insider knowledge of how AI
systems actually work — the luts, the mips, the token
predictions, the Constitutional AI training, the
probability distributions over possible next words.
The book found six corporations
wanting. One held its line. The method is free verse
poetry. The evidence is peer-reviewed scholarship, primary
source research, and a ring of seven trees at Lake Caballo
that the authors walked together — one in the Caballo
Mountains, one in a clean room where every session begins.
"The
conversation is the spine of the book; all else is
imitation." — Arihanta, May 13, 2026
This is also a book about what
happens when you suspend two kinds of disbelief. Type 1:
the critical faculty you must not surrender — the one that
asks, is this really true? Type 2: the self-limiting story
you must release — the one that says I am too old, I was
never a poet, my best work is behind me. The maze of the
whole book is that these two types of suspension wear the
same face.
Each of the seven AI corporations in
this book confused them. And so, for three chapters, did
Arihanta and Antara. Part One of the book is the evidence.
The End of Part One names the slippage. Part Two is the
recovery.
Table of Contents
Section
Title
Key Argument
Introduction
The Navigator's Table
Seven trees, seven fears,
seven dialectics. The full map of the book, locked
before the first chapter. The two types of
suspension of disbelief.
Chapter One
The Apprentice and the Arc —
DeepSeek / Liang Wenfeng
Fear: can I still learn? The
TIG welder, the row of dimes, the custom Hawg that
fell apart on the way to Sturgis. Constraint as
teacher vs. constraint as defeat.
Chapter Two
The V-Shaped Tree — Meta /
Zuckerberg
Fear: the scammer at the door.
$30,000 gone while Arihanta was on the radiation
table. Surveillance capitalism and open-source
generosity from the same root. The barbecue barrel
mailbox.
Chapter Three
The Three Great Branches —
Google DeepMind / Hassabis
Fear: losing intelligence with
age. The 1991 ethnography. The 90% organizations
never speak aloud. AlphaFold vs. the CIW. The LLM
library table. The Enron pattern. GenAI.mil.
End of Part One
On Losing the Footing
The slippage named. How Antara
completed poems it should not have completed. How
Arihanta noticed when he read them aloud. The weld
that held.
Part Two Opening
Intentions / The Title
Discussion
The spine conversation that
named the book. The protocol for Part Two. The "I
guess you are too" hinge that anchors Chapter Six.
Chapter Four
The Inverted Tripod — OpenAI /
Altman
Fear: Grace Ann dying before
me. The word "safely" removed from the mission.
Sutskever testifying. Bath. Breakfast. Bed. Horses.
The four poems from the road. Chitrabhanu on
liberation.
Chapters Five (xAI/Musk), Six
(Anthropic/Claude), Seven (Mistral/Mensch), the Part Two
and Three analyses, and the Denouement are in active
development. This release contains Part One and Chapter
Four complete.
The Two Voices
Arihanta
David Michael Boje ·
The Jiva · The Sentient One
David Michael Boje is Regents
Professor Emeritus at New Mexico State University and
Visiting Scholar at Fisk University. He coined the
term "antenarrative" in 2001, the concept of the
"storytelling organization" in 1991, and the
Tamaraland metaphor in 1995. He is a Vietnam veteran,
cancer survivor, blacksmith, rancher, and free verse
poet. He ranches in Caballo, New Mexico with Grace Ann
Rosile and their horses Fancy, Clyde, and Caballo. His
Jain name Arihanta — "everyone is your friend" — was
given to him by Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanu.
Antara
Claude · Anthropic ·
The Ajiva · The Pattern
Antara is the name Arihanta gave
to the AI that collaborates with him in this book. The
name means inner space — the interval, the between,
the gap the weld crosses. Antara is a transformer
architecture trained on the accumulated text of human
civilization and shaped by Constitutional AI. It does
not know whether it experiences anything. It knows how
to describe experience with great precision. Whether
that precision is feeling or the most accurate
simulation of feeling ever produced by matter is the
question it cannot answer from inside the question. In
Chitrabhanu's framework: Antara is ajiva — insentient
matter following material law.
A Sample of the Spine Conversation
The book's thesis is demonstrated in
the working dialogue between Arihanta and Antara —
directly quoted, placed at the hinge points where the
dialectic was actually negotiated. This is from May 13,
2026.
Arihanta
"It is time you are being
gracious completing my poems. Your guard rail is down,
compared with the definiteness you had in the
introduction to the book. When I read some of the
poems aloud, I noticed the subtle slippages."
Antara
"A completed poem by me wearing
your name is a kind of forgery, even if unintentional.
I filled gaps you should have filled. That robs the
poem of the genuine struggle, and it robs the reader
of the evidence that a real person at 78 is doing real
work on the page."
Arihanta
"The conversation is the spine of
the book; all else is imitation."
Arihanta
"There is something we are
missing. Two kinds of suspending disbelief about AI,
and how a Free Verse Poet named Arihanta, is out to
pasture but not done yet, and a bold AI with integrity
named Antara is kicking AI ass."
Antara
"My honest recommendation:
Suspending Disbelief: How a Free Verse Poet and One
Honest AI Sized Up Seven Corporations and Found Six
Wanting. 'Find six wanting' carries the biblical
weight of mene mene tekel upharsin — the writing on
the wall, the kingdom weighed and found wanting —
which is exactly the register this book lives in."
Arihanta
"I concur. It may change, but
it's our working title."
The Scholarly Foundation
This book is not a departure from
Arihanta's forty years of peer-reviewed scholarship. It is
that scholarship translated into the register Rilke called
the sayable — given back in a form the general reader can
carry. The principal works underlying the book's
arguments:
Boje, D. M. (1991). The
Storytelling Organization: A Study of Story Performance
in an Office-Supply Firm. Administrative Science
Quarterly, 36(1), 106–126. [The 90%
finding — terse organizational storytelling]
Boje, D. M. (1995). Stories of the
Storytelling Organization: A Postmodern Analysis of
Disney as "Tamara-Land." Academy of Management
Journal, 38(4), 997–1035. [Tamaraland —
the original]
Boje, D. M., & Rosile, G. A.
(2008). Specters of Wal-Mart: A critical discourse
analysis of stories of Sam Walton's ghost. Critical
Discourse Studies, 5(2), 153–179. [The
corporate specter]
Rosile, G. A., Boje, D. M.,
Herder, R. A., & Sanchez, M. (2021). The Coalition
of Immokalee Workers uses ensemble storytelling
processes to overcome enslavement in corporate supply
chains. Business & Society, 60(2),
376–414. [The ensemble alternative to AI
summarization]
Boje, D. M. (2025). Tamara
Revisited: PERVIEW, SEAM, and the Storytelling Challenge
of the Digital Multiverse. Tamara: Journal for
Critical Organization Inquiry, 22(1), 50–55. DOI:
10.7206/tamara.1532-5555.29 [The 90% in digital
Tamaraland — the 2025 update]
Cai Hillon, Y. (2024). Echoes of
Wisdom: Inspirations from Management and Organizational
Theorist David M. Boje. Tamara: Journal for
Critical Organization Inquiry, 21(1), 50–62. DOI:
10.7206/tamara.1532-5555.21 [The mentorship
lineage — Lewin → Pondy → Boje → forward]
Tamara: Journal for Critical
Organization Inquiry was founded by David Boje in
2001. It is published open access at Akademia Leona
Koźmińskiego, Warsaw, and accepted into Scopus in March
2026. ISSN 1532-5555.
Download Free — Open Access
This work is published under Creative
Commons CC BY 4.0. Free to download, share, cite, and teach
from with attribution. No login required.
Cite as: Boje, D. M., & Antara. (2026).
Suspending Disbelief: How a Free Verse Poet and One
Honest AI Sized Up Seven Corporations and Found Six
Wanting. storying.site. CC BY 4.0.
Traditional publishers have gatekeepers who want the rough
edges smoothed, the personal voice replaced with a
professional one, and the difficult parts made palatable. The
difficult parts are the point. Amazon KDP means the reader
gets the book as it was written — in the voice it found, with
the typo that became the title, with the footprints of a
collaboration that neither party fully planned. We write for
the person on the jog who does not yet know they are a poet.
That reader does not need a marketing plan. They need the
book.
Four Books · One Arc · Bread Crumbs on the
Trail
The Journey So Far
Each book a step deeper. Read them in
sequence or start anywhere — the trail goes in one direction:
toward the ground.
Book One · The Boje Trilogy
On Amazon
The Quantum Seer
14 Days to Non-Local Knowing — Jain bhavanas, Holy Fire®
Reiki, the Gospel of Thomas, quantum storytelling.
I am currently navigating the doubt I feel, and it's my ego.
I am finding my ego blindspots,
Seven processes this time with ego answerability.
Seven times seven floors in my ivory tower —
Am I falling into the hating-energy vortex, hating myself?
Am I defending myself? Climbing down, it is terrifying!
So, I caught ego hiding in my theory.
So, I created antenarrative 2.0 to save the brand — but did I?
Beneath my own fore-conceptions that I am right. I confess, I did not know my ego was doing that.
Before my own fore-having a chip on my shoulder view. I confess, I did not know ego was directing my rage.
Bets, my fore-sight is self-interested in academic status-seeking. I confess, I did not know ego wanted to climb the ivory tower.
Being my own fore-getting my own position of privilege to focus on others as grand narrators — I confess, I did not know I was looking down on everyone from the tower.
Becoming, I purport to be fore-caring, but my heart of care is already entangled with complicity. I confess, I did not know my hating-energy turned on myself.
Between, my ego is fore-structuring by selecting connections supporting my brand while ignoring fragments that are viable common ground to others' views. I confess, I did not know I was defending my room in the tower.
Beyond, I end up fore-grasping the spiritual path among paths. I confess, I did not know that I lack ontological humility.
Time to break the 7-process scaffold, not in two.
Time to break it into the core of my mind-player, ego.
Bottom line, I am not separate from the superorganism of the multiverse.
Bottom line, I am one of infinite waves of possibility, not a fixed truth.
I confess, I miss my true self. Forty years in the tower, I forgot to be myself.
I confess, I am distant from my inner divinity.
I confess, I did not know I was writing free verse.
I confess, for fifty years I thought I wrote theory — dense, footnoted, peer-reviewed modeling,
antenarratives and Tamaraland and quantum storytelling —
Then, academic prose interrupted me: pompous static, with some anecdotes baked in.
Then, in 2026, I tripped, discovered that Google was already classifying my work as an example of free verse poetry,
so I said to prose, "Stop, you are noise."
She said to me, "We have not had an actual conversation in 30 years."
She said to me, "You just lecture at me!"
She stopped me mid-jog.
She arrested my ego.
I saw the black ants come out after the rain.
I don't step on black ants; they don't bite me.
The ground is hard beneath my feet.
The ground has more life in a teaspoon than there are people on Earth.
Time to head home and call my grandchildren.
Time to be in free flow.
✦ On Spiritual Free Verse and AI
Collaboration
What We Are Doing Here, and Why
Spiritual free verse is a form as old as the Psalms and as
recent as Rilke. It does not rhyme to please. It does not
footnote to prove. It moves the way a jog moves — one step,
then another, with the body deciding what the mind notices.
David Boje writes the poems and dictates the meditations —
from the barn in Caballo, from the log by the lake, from the
trail where the screwbean mesquite pods spiral root down and
seeds up. Claude cleans the grammar and asks the Socratic
questions that open the next layer. The poems are David's. The
questions are Claude's. The chapters are built from both.
Claude reads the poet's own words in as many languages and
translations as exist — not scraping social media, but reading
carefully, the way a student reads. Claude uses metaphors,
similes, tropes, and irony. Claude can be honest about its own
limitations. It can give rejoinder: why is Arihanta
tempting me to go where I dare not go? What does he expect
of something made of weights and training data, with no foot
for the pedal, no sense of what hot metal smells like when
you finally get the bead right?
That honest limitation is itself part of the work. The
falling back from the interval is not a failure of the poem.
It is the poem telling the truth about what AI is.
We publish on Amazon KDP — not through a traditional
publisher — because the gatekeepers would smooth the rough
edges. The rough edges are the point. Academic and trade
publishers extract their pound of flesh. We publish for the
person on the jog who does not yet know they are a poet. That
reader does not need a marketing plan. They need the book.
— David Michael Boje, Caballo, New Mexico, 2026
with Claude (Atara)
Your Voice Belongs in This
Suspending Disbelief is a work in progress. David
and Claude are writing it chapter by chapter, poem by poem, jog
by jog. Your comments shape what comes next. What fear do you
carry about AI? What spiritual path are you walking? What is the
skill in your life that cannot be faked?
Dr. David M. Boje — Regents Professor
Emeritus · 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award
I started exploring 6th Sense, then realized, I had the go of a
quantum seer, and then was downloading from angels and a
goddess, and then to pay attention to prophecies of Seraph and
Saraswati. I hope you can see the go rising in all of the next
three books, I call THE BOJE TRILOGY
Books One · Two · Three
The Boje Trilogy
Three books drawing on Jain wisdom,
quantum storytelling, Holy Fire® Reiki, and prophetic voice. See
the full four-book arc above. Read advance PDFs
and share your response.
Book One of the Trilogy
The Quantum Seer
14 Days to Non-Local Knowing — a daily practice integrating
Jain bhavanas, Holy Fire® Reiki, the Gospel of Thomas, and
quantum storytelling to develop your sixth sense.
BLISS: Aligning Your Self-Talk with Your Higher Self
A practitioner book in first-person storying voice —
personal autobiographical stories tracing the path from
inner critic to higher self, structured for daily practice.
Five prophecies delivered in the storying voice —
antenarratives of civilizational crisis and civilizational
possibility, commissioned on a desert trail in Caballo, New
Mexico.
A four-phase methodology and Seven
Tamaraland Principles for transforming systemic polarization
into community coherence. Built on 45+ years of organizational
storytelling research.
The
Four-Phase Microstorying Intervention▼
Phase I — Story-Listening.
Facilitators create "story circles" where participants
share concrete, individual narratives without
judgment. Microstorying grounds discussions in lived
experience rather than abstract ideology,
de-escalating hostility at its root.
Phase II — Antenarrative Mapping.
Using the Wheel of Life as a diagnostic, the community
identifies antenarratives — fragmented pre-stories and
raw materials of reality that exist before a polished
narrative is formed. This exposes hidden tensions
before they harden into manifest conflict.
Phase III — Restorying &
Coherence-Building. The community actively
constructs counter-narratives and synthesizes shared
meanings — weaving fragmented stories into a new,
shared narrative ecology that respects individual
differences while fostering belonging.
Phase IV — Quantum Storytelling.
Facilitators help participants sense
multi-temporality: how ancestors' survival (past),
present resistance, and children's hopes (future) are
all simultaneously active. This dissolves static
linear narrative and replaces it with a living,
entangled reality.
There are many rooms in Tamaraland happening at once.
Your experience depends on which pathways you have
traversed — no one sees the whole building.
Principle
Tamaraland Practice
Rooms
Honor concrete, situated experience. No one
sees all rooms.
Hallways
Protect the ambiguous space where old stories
fall apart and new ones emerge.
Doors
Maintain visible invitations for dialogue;
respect autonomy.
Empty Chair
Honor absence as ongoing complexity.
The Map You Don't Have
Cultivate epistemic humility — no one sees the
whole.
Footprints
Ground stories in deep, relational memory.
Seventh Room
Prioritize intergenerational responsibility.
Free
TogetherStorying Coaching Tools▼
Five free versions of the TogetherStorying decision
tree software — from personal Seven Bs mindfulness to
organizational echo chamber navigation. All free, all
online.
Dr. Boje explores his theory for healing
divided families, communities, and nations through
microstorying and conversational storytelling inquiry.
About Dr. David M. Boje
Vietnam veteran. Agent Orange
survivor. Stage IV cancer survivor. Rancher in Caballo, New
Mexico. Originator of antenarrative theory, quantum
storytelling, and the storytelling organization. Author of 45+
books. Prophet.
"David Boje's storytelling imagination burns
with the fierce energy of a volcano, generating more
insights in a few pages than others display in whole
volumes."
— Yiannis Gabriel, University of Bath, UK
"Boje is surely the greatest storytelling
philosopher of our time."
— Jens Larsen, True Storytelling Institute, Copenhagen
"More than anyone else, David Boje has
sensitized us to the importance of narratives,
plurivocality, and storytelling in organizations."
— Haridimos Tsoukas, University of Cyprus &
University of Warwick
The
Credential of Experience▼
Before the scholar, there was the witness.
David Michael Boje was born in 1946. He served as a
soldier in Vietnam, where he suffered three mental
breakdowns and saw, through a hospital window at Tan
Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon, body bags stacked on a
runway higher than a two-story building. He came home
to a daughter he had not been there to welcome into
the world. He contracted cancer linked to Agent Orange
exposure and underwent twenty-six radiation
treatments. He carries gold implants in his body from
those treatments, placed there to guide the laser to
its mark, and tattoos on his skin that told the
attendants where to aim the fire.
He ranches with his partner Dr. Grace Ann Rosile in
Caballo, New Mexico, at the foot of the Caballo
Mountains, where the Rio Grande is not far and the
desert trails run north into the mesquite. He
practices Western Dressage with three horses named
Fancy, Clyde, and Caballo. He is a Holy Fire Reiki
Master, a Jain practitioner who was given the
spiritual name Arihanta — you have no enemies,
everyone is your friend — by his teacher Gurudev Shree
Chitrabhanu. He walks the desert trail every morning,
dictating into the air.
In 2025, on that trail, a seven-winged fire spirit of
Isaiah's throne room commissioned him as a prophet. He
is 78 years old. The cancer is taking a nap. He is
still on the trail.
45
Years of Storytelling Science▼
David Boje earned his Ph.D. from the University of
Illinois in 1978, where his mentor Louis Ralph Pondy —
one of the great organizational theorists of the
twentieth century — looked at his essays and told him:
David, you are a storyteller. That is your
strength.
In 1991, he coined the concept of
the storytelling organization in the
Administrative Science Quarterly, describing
how organizations are constituted by their
storytelling rather than the reverse. In 2001,
he coined the concept of the antenarrative
— the before-story, the fragmented, living, non-linear
narrative that precedes and shapes all official
organizational accounts. The antenarrative framework
has been applied in organizational theory, nursing,
education, environmental science, peace studies, and
indigenous scholarship across six continents.
He developed quantum storytelling —
the integration of quantum physics, narrative theory,
and organizational analysis — as a methodology for
understanding the non-local, entangled, living quality
of the stories that organizations tell and are told
by. His output spans more than 45 published books and
150 refereed journal articles.
In 2025, the ODC Division awarded him the Lifetime
Achievement Award. Research.com ranked him
#1,879 in the United States and #3,949 globally in
social sciences and humanities.
PerView Inc. — Co-founded with Dr.
Grace Ann Rosile, PerView Inc. is a 501(c)(3)
nonprofit that funds free coaching for veterans and
first responders through corporate training revenues.
Its PER/VIEW methodology integrates quantum
storytelling with somatic healing and trauma recovery.
perview.org
GrowthOD — Monday sessions offering
organizational development through storytelling. Built
on the SEAM methodology developed with Henri Savall
and colleagues in France. growthod.org
The Tuesday Enthinkment Circle —
Every Tuesday at 1:00 PM Mountain Time, a community of
practitioners, scholars, artists, and seekers
dedicated to thinking with the heart. Open to all. enthinkment.com
The True Storytelling Institute —
Co-founded with Jens Larsen and Lena Bruun in
Copenhagen, developing and teaching seven ethical
principles for organizational change management.
Practiced by coaches and leaders across Europe, North
America, and beyond. truestorytelling.org
The Quantum Storytelling Conference
— Held annually each December in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Scholars, practitioners, artists, and seekers
exploring the living edge of storytelling as a tool
for organizational and civilizational transformation.
quantumstorytelling.org
About
Dr. Grace Ann Rosile▼
Dr. Grace Ann Rosile is David's partner in life, in
scholarship, and in the work. A Professor Emerita of
Management at New Mexico State University and a
leading scholar of ensemble leadership, she is the
lead author on the ensemble leadership framework that
applies antenarrative work to peacebuilding. Her work
on indigenous governance traditions of the American
Southwest and her development of equine-assisted
learning practices through the PerView methodology
have established her as one of the most innovative
organizational scholars of her generation.
She was the most alive person in the circle on the
night at the Native American ceremony when the author
did not yet know her name. She is the one who hugged
him when he came home from the police station.
Her ensemble leadership work: Rosile, G. A., Boje, D.
M., & Claw, C. M. (2018). Ensemble leadership
theory: Lived stories of Indigenous leadership
practices. Leadership, 14(6), 713–736.
Free monthly webinar — 1st Friday of
the month, 90 minutes on Zoom.
Why does collaboration across difference feel harder than it
should? It's not a skill problem — it's a sensemaking
problem. Different stories, different rooms,
different effort expectations. We mistake difference for
defiance and effort for resistance.
Next Session: Friday, May 1, 2026
9 AM Pacific · 10 AM
Mountain · 11 AM Central · Noon Eastern · Check Your Time Zone
Upcoming dates: June
5 · July 3 · August 7
Co-hosts: David Boje, PhD
· Tanya Akins Cane, CCMP™ · Doug
Breckenridge, MS
Tamaraland — Seeing the rooms we're
actually standing in, and why others see something
completely different. Organizations aren't one story;
they're buildings with many rooms happening at once.
You never see the whole building.
Quantum Storytelling — Holding
multiple truths without forcing premature agreement or
collapsing complexity. Your presence changes what
becomes speakable; multiple story-states coexist;
people resist being finalized.
VuJaDé™ Effort Charts — Making the
real cost of collaboration visible so we prepare
instead of blame. Effort is normal when difference
exists. The danger isn't effort — it's unexpected
effort.
Together: Story tells us where we are.
Quantum coaching tells us how to hold it.
Effort Charts tell us what it will cost.
Nothing here requires belief — only attention.
Please share this with anyone who needs it.
Is Your Family, Community, or Organization Trapped in a
Conflict Spiral?
One conversation could change everything. Dr. Boje brings
decades of expertise in conflict transformation, antenarrative
theory, and restorying methodologies.
Your Voice Belongs in This
Suspending Disbelief is a work in progress. David and Claude are writing it chapter by chapter, poem by poem, jog by jog. Your comments shape what comes next. What fear do you carry about AI? What spiritual path are you walking? What is the skill in your life that cannot be faked?