You are a living entity, a creature of beauty and grace that flows from moment to moment. You are a living movement, the indescribable breath of life, or wave of life, or whatever you might want to call it. This is a fact, and has nothing to do with what one might believe to be true.
If I look at you and see a certain kind of person, a person that has hurt me or a person not to be trusted, and I believe those stories, I am dead. I am dead because I am looking at you in a limited way, which is not really looking at all. I might see an image of you, build up my story and so on, but I am not seeing you as you are.
This is the seeing – the storytelling – of a dead man.
The story I build is dead because it is solid and constricting. It does not give you the chance to live. If you have hurt me in some way, I will carry that with me. Then when we meet again, I will not see you, but the memory of the hurt you previously put upon me, so I am stuck in this charade of life. I use the past to see, which has nothing to do with seeing and has nothing to do with you. You might have lived a different life in one million different ways since the last time we met, and yet I still see you with the memory of one incident that may not have happened at all.
It may have been true that someone was a thief, that someone could not really be trusted, and so on. But even so, you do not need to build a story about it. One does not need to carry around the burden of the past.
Any limitation I place on you is clearly my own deficiency. It is born from the things I cannot let go; all the past stories I pull from a holster to use as a weapon.
Human beings are creatures of freedom, living lives of confinement. I will not contribute to that confinement.
10 Comments
I had a dream once that carried a similar theme, though the dream would be hard for me to put into words.
You say that a thief may actually* be not worthy of trust, but don’t carry a ’story’ about it. In some cases, is not remembering what happened a useful tool to decide what to do? ‘Should’ we let go of all memories or just ones that pertain to folks wronging us?
If we are all one, where does that leave the pot I burned my hand on? Is the story that I put my hand to close to its rapid movement no longer useful, and how does it hold me back?
Thanks, Aaron. Great questions…
It certainly is useful as a tool. Humanity crawled out of its infancy by learning of the physical world through trial and error. But the way we use it…or rather, the way we manipulate it to suit the needs of our selfishness, is not useful at all.
Let’s take your example; you burn your hand on the stove. And let’s assume it is the first time. You touch it, and get burned. Then you might think to yourself, “OK, the glowy thing on the stove hurts. I won’t be doing that again anytime soon!” And then you go about your day.
In this example we learned something important; the stove is capable of hurting us if we are not careful. Or to put it another way, the stove burns you and you walk away. This serves you well.
What else is there? You burn your hand, then you walk away. That is all.
Now let’s look at a different example, and pose this to yourself. One day, while you are at work, a friend of yours goes to your house and steals your money. Let’s assume that it is a fact.
Most likely, as you pose this situation to yourself, you can already feel something inside of you. Maybe a sense of wrong or right, or a “He should not have…” and so on. There is also the history the two of you had together. “How could someone I know so well do that to ME?”
You can walk away from the stove, but why can’t you walk away from the actions of your friend? What keeps you there? Look at it for yourself, and see what is there. I am not saying it is right or wrong or anything like that. Just look at this for yourself. Your friend steals from you…then what?
You might say, “Well they are different because the stove is not my friend,” and that is true. But the fact remains; the stove burns you, and you walk away. You friend steals from you, and you cannot. Why can’t you walk away when your friend steals from you? The stove can only burn you once, but in your mind the friend is stealing from you every minute of your life.
(I am using the phrase walk away in a figurative sense. You might not actually throw them out of your life.)
Why is it important to hold on in such a way? To protect yourself? In what way is this holding on, this self-torture, protection? It is not. The memory of his stealing is already there, just as the memory of the stove is already there. You are adding to the friend memory, but not to the stove memory. Why is that?
(By the way, I am saying YOU a lot here, but I do not mean YOU personally.)
In the above example we said, “the stove is capable of hurting us if we are not careful.” We understand that, but we do not hang onto it. It certainly is a memory, but there is nothing necessarily attached to that memory. You don’t have to believe your memories, after all; they are just there.
Now, if we say, “friends are capable of hurting us if we are not careful,” it carries a different sort of weight, doesn’t it? It is very heavy and burdensome. It is very easy to believe this, or build up beliefs about this, then carry it around in order to protect oneself. But acting in such a way is not protection.
If you carry this around with you, it will get in the way of every relationship you may have. You’ll always say to yourself, “Sure, they are nice now, but maybe sometime soon they will screw me over!”
In what way is this ‘hanging on’ useful for a human being?
I guess we could say, when you burn your hand on the stove, you carry no story about it, really. It is just a memory. But when the friend steals from you, the fact is lost somewhere within the stories you build up about why he should not have done it, or the story of what you are going to do to him in retaliation, and so on.
The best thing to do is forgive him, ask him if he needs to borrow money for something important, then change the locks on your house.
The stove burns, you learn something, then you walk away.
This assumes there is someone ‘having’ these memories and is capable of letting them go. It may be a difficult trick to see through. First, how can you let go of memory? And second, is the you different from memory?
These are important questions to consider.
Thanks very much for your comments, and I look forward to seeing you here again.
You have a nice blog, by the way.
The finger-on-the-stove example is pertinent. Everyone manifests moment-to-moment. There are a trillion ever-changing conditions, and we can allow each person and our self to manifest exactly as the way they do, right now.
He stole from me is a fact. What kind of person would do such a thing–is a story. He might steal again. He might not. Caution is prudent. A story is not.
With awakening, the past, even an hour ago, becomes just mental activity, a fuzzy memory of as if it happened in second grade. What we have to learn from it, we learn quickly and innately with having to think about it. If there’s more, it’s a story.
Sometimes, the present seems to just fuzzy mental activity as well.
Kaushik,
That is it, right there.
Yes. There is the facts and there is the story. Soon, the story covers the facts and the memory and what was true is lost. Only the story is remembered. This is the seed of illusion. And the difficulty in seeing through it when the difference is not understood.
It is amazing how much simpler life is when there isn’t a bunch of stories to be remembered. It’s like being a compulsive liar and being stressed by having to keep track of all ones stories. Yet we fear letting them go because we take them personally. We think we are our stories. And thus we experience pain and conflict.
Quite right, Davidya.
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to have a good memory.
I think Judge Judy said that…
Beautiful post, Taukin. It reminded me of the line that Eckhart Tolle uses which is “you are not your story”.
So often people carry their stories everywhere, that they lose sight of the moment and the fact that the story really does not mean anything unless you give it power.
For years, I used to define myself by my story and it made me miserable. Thankfully, I broke free and live each day in the moment. So much so, I often think that the past is like looking at the life of another person. It lost its power and has allowed me to experience each day with no preconceived ideas. It makes living so much more fun and simple.
So I am with you on not wanting to contribute to the confinement of another.
Thanks, Nadia.
The roots of the story may be quite deep. One must be diligent to see this through to the end. Even seeing this as it is might lead to a new story of what oneness is supposed to be.
We must walk lightly.
So true. And this type of story telling, in my experience, is something wer’e especially prone to with family members – we are so very sure we know them…
Btw, love the title of your blog. Back in the eighties I saw a tremedous shift toward image over substance in politics. It doesn’t look like it will go away anytime soon with so much emphasis on being successful at marketing and “branding,” often regardless of the quality of the product or service.
Paul,
I suppose all we can really say is, we have known others.
If you and I were old friends, and if I said, “I know you,” it would be terrible. Certainly, there are far more horrible things going on in this world apart from Takuin saying he knows Paul, but the assumption – that I completely know you – carries its own sort of violence.
Thanks for the compliment. It is clear about the imagery in politics, but it is pervasive on all levels throughout our lives. The imagery in politics will likely never end. It is better for us to ask why we live according to these images, and can they come to an end.
Thanks again.