A Short Story of No Story

Imagine all the memories you can recall, and that you can gather them together into a collection called, “My Past”.  Recall them in quick slideshow fashion, or many of them, because there are too many to remember all at once.  But let these stand for every bit of past experience you’ve ever had since you were born.  

Now, odd as it sounds, consider how much (if any) actual, physical weight each thought or memory has and you realize they’re not much more than little wisps.  They’re like the idea of tiny fireflies, much too small to even be fireflies.  Now imagine holding the entire memory collection in the palm of your hand and then gently pouring it like a fine, weightless powder into a small box with an opened lid.  Once the last bits drift down into the box, gently close it up, and set the box aside for just a moment.  Your entire past is safely kept in that little box.

Now, do likewise with all the wishes, dreams, concerns and thoughts you can imagine about the future.  You'll find them in that special area of daydreaming called, “My Future”.  You’ve made some plans, and you have some hopes.  There are some worries, some deadlines and some expectations - of your own and those that others have of you.  Try to mentally review as many of these as you can, and as you do, consider the minuscule physical sense of each one.  Collect these all together in the palm of your hand and gently pour them into another small box and carefully close the lid on it.

Next, imagine standing and holding one box in each hand, arms a little extended about waist high.  In imagined stillness, you can feel the lightweight boxes, so rather than looking down at them, you look straight ahead at a vast emptiness - a distant fogginess with nothing at all to focus on.  It’s so much like the same view of the inside of your eyelids, that you’re not sure if your eyes are open.  Yet, out of your lower peripheral vision, you are vaguely aware that there is a small table standing right in front of you, also about waist high.  And, it reminds you that you’re still holding the two boxes.  Reflexively, you set the boxes on the table and then let your arms rest at your sides, and resume your distant gaze at the dimensionless depth.  

You don't remember moving but somehow you are now sitting comfortably, and the table must have been moved because you have a full view, looking out at nothingness and you are just you, without your past and your future.  The contents of those boxes made up the story of who you are and they've been set aside and so you are sitting there without even a story and it’s perfectly still and comfortable, and you’re aware without a story there is nothing that needs to be thought about.  Your sense of time seems to have been misplaced with the boxes, and you are content to just be there, or here, or wherever this is doesn’t even matter.  All you are actually aware of is that you are breathing and even that is automatic, regular, relaxed.  You gradually lose awareness of your body, your mind drifts elsewhere, almost like you’re having a dream while you’re awake.  Your body isn’t numb, you’re just not sure if it is still there or if it has somehow become part of the vastness before you and around you.  It doesn’t seem to matter either way, because your attention is compelled by the utter, empty stillness! There's nothing interesting at all about it, there's just nothing at all, period.  Before you had emptied your past and future into those boxes, you never had a chance to do much besides think about, and rethink about, your story.  Now, without your story, you are actually beholding "nothing" and in a kind of ridiculous way, it's fascinating.  A slight smile comes with the thought there's really nothing quite like "nothing".  Or, no thing is like....whatever, there's no meaningful way to describe nothing.   Words begin to seem heavy and awkward and really, beside the point, if there is one.

There was actually a lot of weight in those boxes.  Even though they were small and seemed very light, as soon as you set them down, a lot of body heaviness left with them and you now feel lighter than you ever have before.  It's a delightful, liberating feeling.  Without a story and a body weighing you down, you could even be floating.  You wonder, what's left of me?  And the question answers itself because you're aware that you are left only with awareness.  It’s not awareness from the senses, because you’re not seeing or hearing or feeling anything.  And yet it’s like you have all that and more.  Much more.  It is more than enough to fill you, it is you.  You don’t have awareness, you are awareness!  It is you, and it is without or beyond time or limit and it is life itself and it is everywhere and you are it... .  .   .   .    .     .      

-   -   -   -   -   -

Some people dismiss these kinds of ideas with the comment, “it’s just imagination.”  They will also have stopped reading before now, if they ever found their way here in the first place.  But, if these imaginings seemed vaguely or slightly real to you, it wasn’t "just" your imagination.  It was/is an actual awareness in you that was reawakened and that is often left in a forgotten or overlooked corner of "imagination".  This was no story, the story is in the boxes.


p.s.  If you have never heard Eckhardt Tolle talk, nor read his books, this video is worth taking in, many times. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvZs35QPXz4&context=C4618aa7ADvjVQa1PpcFNHAbIVMaiy6TbnKU4_3U4p1MWvr6nTe5I=

The Unfolding Story...

We consider life mostly as a story.  It’s hard to see it otherwise.  On a personal level, the plot details are extensive and the story-crafting is painstaking and persistent.  There is an urgency to the unfolding story and it demands focus in nearly every waking moment, and even some more during light sleep.  The story is continuously being written and re-written, told and re-told, to anyone who will listen, even if it’s only the little narrator/editor in the head.  While that is often the voice of our harshest critic, it is still our favorite listener and biggest fan.  We are gratified to consider ourselves the authors of our own stories.

More objectively and abruptly, the whole elaborate plot line can be replaced with a short dash, between the birth and death dates on a tombstone.  It seems very harsh to reduce it that way, and yet that is the story of the cemetery.

Beliefs, opinions, things, events and even the other beings in our lives are the content of our life stories.  The content comes and goes with time as the tally of gains and losses accumulate.  The content could be compared to toys in a sandbox.   In this view then, life plays out within the walls of the sandbox like the play of a child using toys in an imagined story.

So, as a young child plays with toys in a sandbox, the early focus is on the toys and how they fit into the story.  There may be some awareness of the sand and the four walls, but that might only go so far as to name the sand and sandbox as being “mine”. 

Gradually, the growing child broadens the focus on the toys to exploring the whole sandbox.  Appreciation for the nature of sand may develop, and it may be enough sometimes to let it flow through the fingers and feel its warmth.  It may even eventually be understood that toys are pointless without the sand.

The toys rust and get broken and are replaced with new ones.  Sometimes there may be so many toys that it is hard to enjoy the sandbox because of the clutter.  They might be tossed out of the box, just to keep the playtime story simpler to imagine. 

It may be that one is fortunate enough to see that the toys are incidental and that it is the sand that is unchanging.  One may grow to reflect on the limitations of the four walls and take a glimpse beyond them.  Imagine a child looking up to see countless sandboxes, each with a child playing with toys.  

Now, imagine becoming aware that all the sandboxes are scattered across an endless beach of the same sand...  
            The sand has no story.  It just is. 

Imagine being able to intentionally set aside your story for a time.  Without that to command your attention, who, or what, then, are you?


Many Christians observe the start of Lent with an Ash Wednesday service where the minister may say, "from ashes you were made, to ashes you will return."  Sometimes they use the word "dust" instead. Given the images presented here, it could just as well be considered as Sand Wednesday.

Successive Approximations: the Practice of Life

Some years ago, aspiring school teachers who studied the approach to effective instruction were told to: "Diagnose, remediate, monitor and adjust".  Those terms assume a dispassionate, objective view of others who are trying to learn.  For example, not included in the list are: "yell, freak-out, sulk, or fret".  Yet, if one were to observe any given classroom long enough, they might easily see some of these work their way into the mix.  Why? It's human.  Even the best teachers are still human, although we expect them to "rise above" that baseline label.

Why don't we have the same high expectations for ourselves: "to rise above" our selves?  In other settings, far from the noble aims of school, we see all manner of petty, reactive behaviors that make the rest of us "tsk, tsk" our disapproval (as we privately and habitually seat ourselves on the judgment throne).

'A dispassionate, objective view' is easy to apply in the abstract, but most of us humans basically are petty and reactive (perhaps especially when exhausted, which is what teachers often become toward the end of the school day).  For too many others, there's little better to expect at any time.  Too often, the ups and downs of daily life are taken personally and are felt to affect core issues of survival, when nothing even close to that is the case.  We can survive the loss of a parking space to a car that cut us off, and yet up goes the middle finger, along with an urge to vote the other driver off the planet.  At the moment of reaction, smiling at the other driver makes just as much sense; it would be more unsettling to the other and more calming for us, (although not if it's done as a weapon substitute for the middle finger!)

Toward bringing objectivity more consistently into daily life, a few exercises might be tried.  One is to imagine (remember) thoughts of an airline passenger looking down on the little cars scurrying around on the streets like a colony of confused ants.  For those in the cars, making it into the next intersection before the yellow light seems crucial.  Not so much from 30,000 feet.  The drivers are intent on their list of important errands, the overhead observer sees only bustling nonsense.  From a higher perspective, most of what we do doesn't matter all that much.

Another exercise is to take a usual habit of looking in the mirror and expand the experience, to the infinite.  Place another mirror behind you and just off to the side, so that your reflection is reflected, ad infinitum.  This demonstrates how a rather shallow, everyday experience (checking for one's own surface imperfections) can be rendered quite insignificant by considering one's place in an infinite context.  One's self image after several iterative reflections is small and recedes further until it's indistinguishable.

One last exercise is to take a walk through a cemetery now and then.  The stones mark the resting places of hundreds of people who thought they were each the center of the universe.  (But if that proves to be the case, it would seem the surest way to that end is by becoming part of the dirt.)  One can only hope that the denial of their mortality didn't rob them of too many of life's joys.

The point of objectivity in daily life is humility.  No one has truly mastered even the simplest of tasks.  Even conscious breathing is most often overlooked and the value of one, deep, conscious breath is amazing.  Reflexively, you're probably trying it now.

We're all just fumbling along through life and we might as well stay humble while we're at it.  When we're at our best, we try to operate with successive approximations, or as the instruction goes: diagnose, remediate, monitor and adjust.  We have a life practice going on with a goal of improvement.  Mistakes and tough breaks are for learning and growth, not reacting to out of base urges or personal feelings.

Humility has a common Latin origin with "earth", i.e. the ground (humus).  Normally, when we say one was 'treated like dirt', we pity him and despise the other's misbehavior.   Soil is far more noble than a human who would lord it over others.  Such arrogance will eventually crumble and erode, although usually not soon enough for the rest of us who don't mind working with a little dirt under our fingernails, at the practice of life.

A Place to Be

My home isn’t as good as it once was, but I’ve lived here all my life and I’m comfortable.  Over time, the creaking noises have grown louder, and there are plumbing issues and the wiring isn’t that great.  But at least I have a place to be, which counts for a lot.

You might say it’s “cozy”, but I think it is just right.  There are only two rooms, the main room and the sun porch.  If you came inside, you’d see I spend most of my time in the main room.  It’s awfully cluttered and needs a good cleaning.  I would only describe it to you though, I’d never have anyone in.  

I also don’t go out.  I live alone, but I’m not lonely.  I have the radio for company.  Ah yes, the radio.  There is this damned problem with the radio, the little knob never did work right.  It won’t turn off, and the plug is out of reach behind the bookcase.  I can adjust the volume a little and change stations, but otherwise it’s always on. 

When the radio starts to drive me crazy, I go out to the sun porch.  It’s got big windows, and is filled with light and all kinds of house plants.  When I close the door behind me there, I am suddenly in another world, silent and warm and I reward myself with a deep breath of invigorating air.  I feel embraced by the room’s humid fragrance and am completely refreshed.  The sun porch energizes me and the peaceful feeling lasts long after I leave.

I know what you’re thinking, because I’ve also had the thought many times that I should just live out there instead.  But one has to make choices, and I think it’s important to keep up with the news and such on the radio.  Also, I know it sounds crazy, but it somehow seems creepy that the radio would still be playing, but with no one there to listen. 

Still, sometimes it’s hard to come back in from out there.  After spending a quiet afternoon gazing through the sunny windows, I often feel the urge to venture out the porch door for a long, pleasant walk over the green, wooded hills.....