Wednesday 7 January 2009

Stories


How you feel about your life is largely a function of the story you tell yourself. This is living unconsciously, which makes you a character in a drama, the victim of narrative.

Social mythology would have you understand yourself in terms of the tale others tell you and you subscribe to, which is not unfounded, but you are not really that.

On one level, the sequence of events are a story playing itself out and we are each on the journey of living it through interpretation. On a deeper level, we are just consciousness.

Stories are not present, they are in the mind, understandings comprising the constructs we have gathered from society. When you are in your story, you are not here now.

It’s like being in a cinema watching a movie. You are following the story but it is just projected light making a certain sense on your inner screen. The here and now - the seat you are sitting on, the darkness of the room, and the person sitting next to you - is not in your field of attention.

Most of the time, most of us are absorbed in an emotionally charged drama that is hardly real, while reality surrounds us just out of sight. Have you ever turned around while a film is playing and looked at the people sitting in rows? They are transfixed by fantasy, riding a rollercoaster of identification with illusion.

In the cinema, they are escaping real life and living vicariously through a fictitious character. In the realm of narrative, what they would call real life, they are doing the same thing! The fictitious character is the false self they feel is them.

Real life is outside the story, in the present. It is detached from drama, which is still there but not dominant. The conscious self is not lost in identification with the illusion.

When you access the present, it frees you from attachment to the story and its histrionics.

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