STORIES
Something is wrong with how, as humans, we live our lives. It is so very far from the real and true it is in a different dimension altogether.
Using the concept of linear time as if it were how life happens we tell stories to each other. Telling stories fosters attachment to concepts. Every child must be corralled and subjected to years of heavy-duty training before the life we want for them is encoded strongly enough in their young minds to invent a mechanical thing that can be controlled through fear and made a citizen of an imaginary nation, a wife or
husband, a father or mother, a sports fan, a book reader, an organized religion’s follower, a money maker, credit card carrier, a consumer etc. etc. etc. It is called child rearing and schooling and coaching and religious training and advertising. It is sad indeed to admit that in a few years of this the small human’s “nature” will be commonly described to be the way the indoctrinated machine functions and what the free child began as will be labeled “wild” and “beastly” and sadly condemned as evil. It is enough to make a body sick. And so it does.
It is worth looking into the matter carefully since we follow this line of thought as our principle way of dealing with one another when it is so false. One has been taught to cherish stories by repeated doses of them beginning early in childhood. Some parents begin to read to a child in the womb. All are convinced it is so good a thing to do. Johnny went to town. Johnny was tempted to steal a plum. Johnny decided not to steal the plum. Johnny is a good boy and we like him. Johnny played ball. Johnny practiced every day and worked very hard to learn to play well. Johnny’s team won every game. We adore Johnny and want to be like him. The cop wants to hear your story. The judge wants to hear your story. The jury wants a story. Your boss wants story after story. Your wife or husband, too. Your parents. And so on.
A cherished experience of mine took place back when I was practicing law as a career. It taught me to see through stories to find something precious. I had gotten a call that my sister and brother-in-law needed my help at court since they were being held for trial on charges my nephew had been cutting school. Parents were made by law liable for the truancy of their offspring. I immediately marched to their aid. I listened a few moments to the proceedings and picked up that the judge was expressing grave concern over the matter and was threatening to hand out severe punishment to my relatives. Quickly, I requested a moment alone with my nephew to discuss the case which request was granted. I escorted my nephew out into the hall outside the hearing of the court and asked him simply, “Why are you not going to school, Jonathon?” After a few moments the child replied, “I don’t know.” His answer pierced my heart and I wanted the judge to feel it so I took Jonathon back before the Judge without further questioning of the child and there repeated my question and we heard the same plain answer come from a place all humans recognize without doubt as real pain. That judge changed completely into an understanding friend to the whole family even expressing a promise to work patiently with us to help Jonathon work out a satisfactory outcome to any difficulty with his schooling.
Motion is not action. Action is not motion. Motion is the outcome of action. But you do not agree. You insist it is motion and it takes time precisely because you have been conditioned to think so by repeated storytelling. Seeing is action. Every action is happening to the whole Universe and has its effect throughout it. To describe such a vast happening would be totally impossible. I heard it told that a man knows as a fact that at the time of his earliest ancestor, maybe a million years ago, there was in existence in the DNA of that ancestor all that would eventually bring him forth by birth a million years later and he is living proof of that fact and furthermore it means that inside him is something as old as mankind. He has existed that long at least.
Existence occurs in a vastness that can only be approached in humblest acceptance. All can be said is it happened. And each human is aware every moment of how happenings are impacting its body. That is all we know and it is enough. The bodies are fully capable of responding to what happens as it happens in what is experienced as the present. We cannot act in the past or the future. Seeing is action. That is a fact. In our natural state a human is without conflict or the accompanying fear conflict causes. There is clarity. There is freedom. There is passion and there is love. Such is an entirely different way of living from the story telling way. In the way of truth a life is bound in love by free hearts. Johnny, in this dimension, will trust his instincts in the present where life is actually taking place and let each day be experienced for all it is worth leading to the next one. Such an attitude is in harmony with all other singers and brings shared joy in a way all the planning and striving for goals, for progress as we define it, can never possibly bring to Johnny. So many who have succeeded in their plans have testified to this fact,
“I had it all and I was miserable”.
This story we can tell to end stories in linear time to deprive them of their power over us.
So why do we insist on telling stories. Well, we have decided to separate ourselves from the whole of life and live as individuals and we call it freedom because the idea that spawns the separation told us we will now be free to decide for ourselves how we want life to go.* It felt good in the same way that many drugs feel good temporarily and then abandon us. We hope we will be rewarded for the good things we do and punished for the bad things we do. We learn by society’s conditioning to proudly proclaim “ I do it my way.” Trouble is, your life and my life are not our own, they are inseparable from the life that binds all living things.
We do not follow that fact. For very complex reasons people elect to pretend to act in the past and future and not now at all. Now is just ignored as only important for planning tomorrow or regretting yesterday. In the scheme people have invented tomorrow holds our dreams. And tomorrow never comes and we end up with a bag of empty yesterdays. We may want to explore some of those complex reasons later but for now we will concentrate on the fact that is enough to make anybody sick.
To tell a story in linear time one must be committed, locked firmly, into a really limited concept of one’s capability. So limited is it that it is a fact that it is unworthy of consideration by anyone who is sane. Since the entire universe is back of all happenings one must be willing to ignore 99.99999% of what is involved in a happening to shrink it by imagination into a story over linear time involving a limited number of actors to make a story in linear time manageable. One person opens a story “I recall my mother laughed a lot”. From that, meaning is to be conveyed. Its supposed meaning is so lacking in the consideration of an unlimited number of factors it is useless as science and so very dangerous to us all. Nations go to war based on such trivia. Doctors prescribe drugs which have an unknown number of side effects. Parents punish children based on unreliable stories based in linear time which never happen. Religious leaders promise a happy after-life based on such stories. This practice can be seen if examined closely as providing society with a means of placing blame and praise on its citizens solely to make it seem to the conditioned brains of its citizens that the society is controlling their lives for them when nothing could ever be farther from the truth. It is pure entertainment offered up by hacks that brings jerry-rigged solutions we are living with and when suffering comes, which it must, we describe it as “the way life is” unnecessarily. A mere fix is a pathetic basis for a human life. We use them everywhere now and give out awards for doing so.
It is not suggested here that any reader undertake a plan based in linear time to correct the situation described for the very reason it would be the same conduct that has afflicted us up to now, the false belief that action is motion. Seeing the dilemma will bring about a whole new approach to the vastness of life where no spelled-out particular course of action will be needed.
The only reported way out of the mess is a serious study undertaken with deepest passion into one’s own psyche in order to find what has been done to you with purpose so cruel. By that effort it is possible to be in a position to help others recover their power. One such individual has written:
“he told me a long time ago that I need conscious contact with a power [of now] greater than myself [as a planner]. He has helped me develop that contact and I cherish the experience.” Another has written, “he helped me to put my mind, hands, and eye together to express consciously what I felt unconsciously and I got yesterday, today, and tomorrow in the same room and there’s very little you can’t imagine happening.” The talks of J Krishnamurti which graciously have been saved and are available free on the internet are an excellent resource.
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* Up to this point we have found the meaning of the Bible Story in Genesis of the fall from a garden paradise by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. One of the wisest people I have known, J Krishnamurti from India, told many times to listeners that it is so very important to see that all knowledge ALL KNOWLEDGE is limited. And would often point out that we know that because knowledge is made from experience and memory which are definitely also limited. In the story it is God’s love for us that wants us to never rely upon limited knowledge for when we do we create more problems every time. As an example it has been shown that scientists are constantly coming up with new inventions, making a whole lot of money for themselves and companies who use their inventions, only to always discover the many, sometimes deadly, consequences of the uses of the new invention. The record is clear on this yet we, in our societies, continue to repeat the tragedies and to call it “progress”. Some who find with clarity this practice is only for the most foolish will see that and the practice, for them, will end. You may want to consider a serious search yourself. According to Genesis God wants that much for all of us today and, who knows, ending it may put us back in the Garden together where we belong.
