Your Stories
The important characteristic of the Mind is that it permanently produces stories. These stories often have a disastrous end. For instance, I suddenly try to remember whether I locked the door of my home or not. The Mind immediately fabricates a whole story around the idea: I did leave it open, a burglar came, my valuables have been stolen, and the police, instead of chasing the thief, will harass me with their questions. We often experience the ends and emotional consequences of these stories. Another type of story deals with us, who are we, what are we like, what we should do or should have done. The entirety of these stories comprises our personal history.
Everybody has their own personal history. Our parents began to weave our personal history; first they told us who we were, they relayed the rules of living in a community, together with other people within a specific society. Then the little Ego was born in us, and we started to listen to the voice of the Ego that began to tell us our personal history. The inner voice told us a story about who we were and which way our life was heading. We found the story so convincing that it never even occured to us to question its truth. But is this story really true, or is this just the Ego, babbling away and leading us into the cobweb of thoughts hopelessly?
The Anatomy of the Personal History
Every waking moment of our life fits a personal history with our own Self in its focus. Our life can only be interpreted within the framework of that history. The reason for that is that we identify with the voice of the Ego, the narrator of our own story, so closely that our personal history becomes the foundation of our entire life. But is this story really true, or is this just the Ego, babbling away and leading us into the cobweb of thoughts hopelessly?
A closer look at that personal history will reveal that our internal story consists of a fabric of experiences and thoughts. Thoughts that explain our experiences, thoughts that we believe and with which we identified, thoughts that will thus provide the foundations of our self-determination.
Our personal history keeps us under its spell, in a hypnotic state in which all our attention is devoted to the inner voice and story it tells. In this way we give up our alertness, the world passes by us, because we only concentrate on the elements of reality that appear to confirm our personal history. We therefore lose our grip on the deeper dimensions of life. The deeper dimensions are present in our life, but we lose contact with them because of our lack of Alertness.
Beyond the Personal History
The question may arise in us whether we are really identical with our own personal history, or perhaps we are more than that? Everybody has some vague suspicion that our personal history does not reflect reality, we are in fact at a deeper level than that.
When everything is apparently all right in our personal history, we achieve our goals, we are happy, and the vague suspicion vanishes entirely in us, and our identification with our personal history becomes more powerful. There are, however, moments in our life when nothing appears to succeed, so we are unhappy and we suffer. The suspicion then reinforces in us, and we tend to believe that we are more than the cluster of thoughts that constitute our personal history. We realize that we are more than mere thoughts.
As long as we insist on our personal history, and on the storyteller, the deeper dimensions of our existence remain unaccessible for us. Not because these deeper dimensions are not present in our life, but because weaving the web of our personal history engages all our attention.
Waking up from the Personal History
If we become aware and conscious of our own personal history that we are telling ourselves, we have a chance to wake up from the hypnotic spell of our personal history.
In order to become aware and conscious of our personal history, we must ask ourself the question, ”Who is it, talking in my head, who is this inner voice, telling me my own personal history?” The only possible honest answer to that question is, that ”I have no idea!” Any other answer is rooted in the personal history, and as such, it is to be rejected.
The honest answer may easily be a shock for us, completely uprooting our life the way we lived it previously. The more closely we identified with our personal history, the bigger our astonishment may be. We no longer believe in what we have firmly regarded as our own personal history. This experience may, however, lead us to the point of questioning the truth of what we believed to be true in connection with ourselves.
This is the first sign that we begin to wake up from the hypnotic effect of our personal history. Now our attention is no longer fully engaged by our personal history, the storyteller telling us the story, and our identification with the story. We may then become sensitive to the deeper dimensions of our life.
We are the Entirety of Existence
The gateway leading us to the deeper dimensions of Life is Alertness, which appears as a result of the release of our attention from the hypnotic state of listening to our personal story. The new Alertness enables us to learn about ourselves without identifying with our thoughts and emotions.
What we first experience in this new, alert state beyond our thoughts and emotions is the completeness of existence. In that state all fragmentation disappears from our life, we recognize the inner spaciousness of our existence, our inner happiness and tranqulity. We feel at home in our own skin, and we realize that our alert consciousness is free from all kinds of thoughts and emotions.
We then may decide whether we wish to continue to listen to our personal story, or we move further on, towards the quiet foundations of our existence.
~From the book: Frank M. Wanderer: The Revolution of Consciousness: Deconditioning the Programmed Mind
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