The Stories We Tell

We all live the stories we tell ourselves. We can’t help but do so. Our every thought, choice, action, and experience is driven by such narratives.  In most cases, we don’t understand we’re living out these fairy tales, because we don’t realize they exist. The problem is that we don’t recognize we’re living in a fable based on false beliefs that causes limitations in our lives, keeping us from becoming the most beautiful expression of who we truly are.

My life has been a series of stories. While the tales have grown grander and more complex as I’ve expanded my understanding of the universe, they still have served to limit my definition of who I am, as well as my belief in my own capabilities.

When I was born I had no such stories. I came into the world knowing exactly who and what I was. But then I forgot, just as we all do. The forgetting wasn’t instantaneous. It happened gradually as I took the inevitable journey virtually all humans take from soul to ego.

In the beginning, I knew no fables. Instead, I experienced the world through the mythology of others. Soon, however, their truth about me became my own, and the true glory of my being dissolved from my memory. It faded like a sepia photograph packed away in a forgotten drawer.

This is the path humans take as we explore our lives in the physical plane. We come fully enlightened, knowing that we will be slowly conditioned to forget. Once our true nature slips completely from our memories, we function within a new, limited and false view of who we are.

In our forgetting, we completely believe our own personal mythology. We drift through at least part of our life awash in the trappings of the ego, bowing before the false gods of power, human knowledge, and consumerism. We create drama, outrages, joys, fears, and sorrows without realizing they are merely illusions of separation. While we create these phantasms, the spark of who we truly are remains locked away in a hidden tower with sturdy walls that holds the secret drawer containing a faded photograph waiting to come to life in full vibrant color once more.

All it takes is a single moment to spark remembrance. Then, that first nascent flicker reveals as false a tiny part of the wall of ego we’ve built. The flicker becomes a single flame, and then a raging inferno. In the brightness of the flames, we can suddenly see that the walls we’ve constructed to prop up our “personality” are nothing more than illusions that have little to do with who and what we truly are. It is then that we can begin the process of remembering that our essence is love, and that everything else is nothing more than a myth.  

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