We’re born into a story. A story of culture and heritage – of country, shaped by region, city, neighborhood – fixed by family, gender, race and class. We believe this story as truth. Until one day … maybe, we can imagine something different.
When John Lennon and Yoko Ono released “Imagine” I was 12. Their call for me was set inside my story. Could I imagine no heaven? No nation – no possessions? No I couldn’t, not then.
Reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Dues; A Brief History of Tomorrow is opening my mind to a potential that John Lennon saw 47 years ago. It’s uncomfortable, unnerving and exciting.
Let me step outside my story, my comfort zone; see reality from a different vantage point. Change my perspective; make an actual paradigm shift.
Could I try on for size the possibility that there’s no heaven, no hell and purgatory just doesn’t exist? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. My sins won’t be punished; my sacrifices unrewarded. No being born again. All that exists is today. If this is true – what changes? Do I choose differently?
Considering I’ve depended on Karma – with a CAPITAL K to take care of some of the most egregious shit-heads of the world a new story is a huge ask for me.
Harari cleverly outlines psychological and scientific aspects of our “experiencing self” and “narrating self” – how our self-told stories shape what and how we feel. He says that it’s “much easier to live with the fantasy because the fantasy gives meaning to suffering.”
Byron Katie’s approach – doing “The Work” to accept life as it meets me, helps move me off a story that’s grinding me down. Make Inquiries. Ask – The Four Questions and Turnaround:
- “Is it true?
- Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
- How do you react; what happens when you believe that thought?
- Who would you be without the thought?
… Turn it around, and find three genuine examples of how the turnaround is true in your life.”
This is how Byron Katie helped me “Let Go of the Big Mad”
It’s all a story.
I’m tellin’ ya – we gotta . . . TELL BETTER STORIES!!!
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
[Pi:] “So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?” – Yann Martel, The Life of Pi
Yes – on occasion acceptance of things I can’t control is appropriate. Do I have the wisdom to know the difference between the things I can change and those I can’t? There’s a prayer for that!
Recently my Flipboard Newsfeed brought the Feb 2016, Time Magazine article 
When I pulled this card out of the pack – to see what the Universe wanted me to meditate about; my first reaction was to put it back and pick another card. Surely I checked the “don’t be predictable” box!
Don’t be so predictable.
It struck me this morning how brutally judgmental I can be toward my younger self. Told some friends at lunch the other day that reading through my 30-year old journals was exhausting … as the old me was a sad and pathetic character. They laughed at my melodrama – but HELL, I was being serious. It would be better if I wrapped a mental arm around that hot young mess and told her everything was going to be okay. Instead I’m shaking my head and rolling my eyes. Harsh.
My journal review project is showing me that I fell down over and over AND OVER again. Newsflash! I will fall down again. In those days my youthful optimism – or artless gullibility, propelled me forward. Every face plant gave way to a new scheme from new age mysticism, religious devotion to psychological theories.
I was that child’s clown bop bag – always popping back up. A rebound for every fall. Luck, grace or providence spared me, as the extent of my recklessness; willful or unwitting, was epic.
Are my thoughts a habit of mind that I acquired as I grew up? Were they planted by my family . . . cultivated and nurtured by my peers, experience and education? Or are they “closer to being instincts” as Robert Wright proposes in his book Why Buddhism Is True? A classic conundrum – nature vs. nurture.
All those stories I tell myself and others about who I am, what I know, are just that – stories. Believing my own stories, that drama; the spectacle – creates suffering. Letting go, releasing my expectation that a certain something must happen, brings a relaxed sense of calm.