Hidden Treasure

Most of my life was spent at war with the characters—including the lead, me—in my story. They weren’t good enough, or smart enough, or deep enough. At one point in the story of me, none of us was rich enough. At another point, when material possessions were disdained, none of us was poor enough. It was never right. It could always be better. Sometime in the future, I could make my story turn out to fit my latest idealization, or so I hoped. For four decades I worked at building a story that would fulfill me. Periods of happiness and peace came and went. Lasting happiness remained out of my grasp. It took some time to realize that the lasting fulfillment I was seeking couldn’t be captured by any story I told about myself. The fulfillment I was seeking in my many attempts to tell a story of victory couldn’t be captured, because it is free. It took more time to realize that my story was mysteriously appearing in that which is already fulfilled. It was a beautiful and wonderful shock to discover that freedom and fulfillment were never absent, whatever the latest rendition of my story. My story was an individual display of the search for the living free consciousness already inhabiting each character. When I recognized the silent fulfilled core in all versions of myself—and all the others in my story—I could rest. In the spaciousness of rest, I could begin to live my life from fulfillment, rather than continuing to search for it.

All creatures are born inescapably defined by their stories, yet if we remain limited by those definitions we live a life of inner bondage. When we recognize the stories that generate our definitions of ourselves, we are closer to the discovery of what is indefinable within us. That discovery reveals inner freedom and lasting fulfillment.

Each life-form has a beginning, an arc of a life story, and then an ending. Most of our internal and external attention and communication circle around the particulars of how we define ourselves as collective life and how we define ourselves, or others, as particular life. Other animals, trees, flowers, butterflies, spiders, rocks, planets, and solar systems also have their stories, and the broadcasting of their stories is both our greatest entertainment and our inevitable humbling. We can find ourselves, or parts of ourselves, in all stories and we can separate ourselves through our stories.

We all come from life-giving energy, are infused and animated by life energy to become a particular life-form, and we all end in returning to formless life. Along the way there are small and great dramas, crossroads of destiny, and surprises both wondrous and horrific. Some life stories end very quickly and some go on and on. There are countless dramas within this bigger, incomprehensible universal story. Stories are sung, put into sacred books, memorized, dramatized, and consulted generation after generation. Our collective cosmic story is a teeming theater of life-forms appearing and disappearing. Forms are born, live through many stories, and then die. Before any form appears, life is here. During the lifetime of any form, life is animating that form. After any particular form dies, life—while withdrawn from that form—remains here. Life is true. It is always here.

Our particular, individual life story begins in our mother’s womb. We are well- or ill-tended there through a number of convergent factors. While the incubation in the womb happens more or less the same for all humans, research has shown that the outside environment can also greatly affect the fetus. Whatever stories parents are living influence their developing baby. The diversity of womb environments ranges from the worst—babies conceived in concentration camps or prisons, babies born of rape, fetuses whose mothers are in dire poverty, crack babies, babies with fetal alcohol syndrome, fetuses whose mothers are mentally or physically ill—to the best: babies prenatally tended with love and care, in nontoxic physical, mental, and emotional environments for both fetus and mother. Genes and early environment contribute in great degree to form the earliest version of each individual creature’s story, and yet even in the womb the early individual can mysteriously defy both best and worst.

We inherit much of the foundation for our story from our families and our communities of birth. We also have the innate ability as an intelligent life-form to consciously cast off much of what has been preordained for us or has previously defined us. Even something as seemingly fixed as gender is subject to cultural input for its meaning, and in our current era, through surgery and biomedicine, choice is possible. Our definitions of ourselves are formed, disassembled, and re-formed by what we absorb and what we reject.

The journey of a human life in even a day, and noticeably in a year, a decade, or a century, is a series of stories, a few relatively stabilized at the center, some contradictory, some similar, some long forgotten, and all manipulated and re-formed by the latest acceptance or rejection. We have a huge closet filled with the basic “clothing” of past events that we then rearrange, remix, or discard for particular needs at particular times. We have within our cells uncountable narratives of love and hate, of peace and war, of realized dreams and abject failures. Each plays its conscious and subconscious role in how we define and clothe ourselves. Each is a rendition or an aspect of the life story.

Since the definitions that are generated by our stories are stable only in part, inquiring into our stories—especially their central themes—can reveal early and continuing arrangements of events to support a particular central identity. Definitions of who we are as individuals are changeable and are rearranged to be worn for the latest version or role being played in our particular story, but the central identity is what we refer to when we say “I” or “me.” It is what finally feels solid to us as the changing winds of success and failure swirl through our thoughts.

When our parents are in charge of our lives, they have the greatest input into our developing identities. By the time we begin school, we are open and available for the input of our peers and we grow into more socially formatted identities. When adolescence hits, our hormonal imperative reveals that we are no longer who we thought we were even a few years earlier. As our individuation dynamically continues, the central identity continues to apparently solidify. Maturation and then old age, with their accompanying biological and cultural stories, prove that while our individual “me” may feel solid, the periphery is always changing.

The truth of our stories is not bound to the verifiable facts of the story. Shakespeare’s version of Richard III may be only loosely factual, but the character in the play vibrates with an aspect of human character. The memories you have may be in complete accord with your character and the thrust of your life without having much to do with the actual events around those memories. Memories are fabricated in many ways—through others’ stories, through fears and desires, through neurosis or psychosis, or just through the small adaptations added with growing perspective. In a real sense the events in our memory are fluid. They flow around, crash into, or adapt themselves to our latest versions of ourselves.

The facts themselves are not even true, if by true we mean that which remains unchanging. The so-called facts are assumed to be of central importance at one time and irrelevant at another. They come and go at our convenience. At any one time the facts of our life may reflect the truth of our life, but this reflection is always at least slightly warped. The very vastness of life remains free of our objectification of it.

The recognition that nothing that can be recaptured in memory is verifiable as actual truth is both humbling and liberating. When we meet with friends and family, as well as enemies, and recollect the past, it can be shocking to discover how events have been created or forgotten. Of course, our memory of particular events may seem irrefutable to us. To others, with opposing memories of those same events, the same irrefutability is just as certain. We believe our mental/emotional objectification of events—our stories—even when actual factual evidence to the contrary is presented to us.

There are many who live torturous lives of unremitting toil and suffering. There are also many who live lives filled with miserable events and yet mysteriously do not suffer. And, just as mysterious, there are those who live lives of ease and plenty and yet suffer greatly. Our inner lives are certainly affected by external facts, but they are not controlled by those facts. The truth of one’s life, whether a life of suffering or a life of ease, does not lie in the facts of that life. Our inquiry here is concerned with the truth of your life. The events, and memories of those events, are the clothes that can obscure the naked truth of your life. The events, and the assemblage of memories around those events, of a life story can be the starting point of the disrobing into that inner truth.

When we recognize the unreliability of memory, we become liberated from the practice of looking into it for definitions and proofs of who we are. Our attention is then free to discover the unchanging truth of ourselves, our deepest inner life. The mental and emotional energy we expend telling and retelling our stories internally in our thought dialogues and externally in our presentations of ourselves can be shifted. We can direct our attention to discovering what is unaltered regardless of infinite alteration all around. We can turn our attention toward the truth of the matter rather that the definition of the matter.

The interaction and overlapping of one’s story and another’s story happens throughout our lives. Our family’s story, our clan’s story, our racial story, our religious or nonreligious story, our national story, and the multitude of other stories we find ourselves a part of are woven of the threads of narratives. Our personal story is another thread, a part of many greater weavings. The importance of the influence of others on us and us on others cannot be overemphasized.

It is natural in our species for families, nations, religions, cultures, and subcultures to pass on knowledge through storytelling. This book is concerned primarily with the spoken and written word, but stories are universally transmitted in prose or poetry, music, dance, and art of every medium. From our earliest learning and throughout our lives, we look to stories to show us the way. And they do. For better and worse, our stories become the reference points for defining who we are, who we are with, and what it all means.

Most likely our first stories are sung to us when we are infants. A favorite memory of mine is bouncing on my daddy’s knee to a song about a horse. When the part came about the “horsey falling down,” his knee would collapse and I would fall to the floor, except that he still held me by the hands. I would squeal in pleasure and excitement as we played it over and over. Perhaps the primary nourishment of the game was feeling my father’s love, but it was also an essential lesson about things collapsing and remaining all right in the midst of that collapse. It was an introduction to the surprises of the world, cushioned by the support of a primary protector.

As we grow older, if we are lucky we have stories read to us. A children’s story is usually framed in the context of teaching the values and taboos of the child’s culture. To more easily grab the attention of the child’s mind they are designed to thrill and frighten. Often the endings are reassuring. Cinderella does get the Prince even though she had to go through the suffering of being unseen and misunderstood before her victory. Often they are terrifying. Little Red Riding Hood learns a lesson of the dangers of naively believing in appearances, even though she too is saved in the end. The context of most archetypical children’s stories is the preparation of children for the dangers of the world. It is a noble and necessary task for each generation. There are also more subtle children’s stories that address the inner world and the mysteries of the universe. These stories acknowledge the hugeness of a child’s surroundings and help somewhat in navigation. In these more inward-directed stories, the context is also teaching and guidance along with supporting and soothing.

If we are lucky we learn to read and can begin to choose what stories to fold into our identity. I discovered reading to myself at an early age, and it has remained an essential aspect of my life since. The stories and books I read entertained me and gave me an escape from aspects of life out of my control. I would try to be more like the characters I loved, Heidi and later Nancy Drew, and would revel in their successes over the inevitable trials in their path. My storybook characters contributed greatly to the formation of myself as a person. Later, in more mature reading, I began to discover subtleties and nuances of character that would deepen my experiences of others and myself. Stories guided me into deeper waters. Stories helped me formulate and define myself. They served as both solace and challenge.

A story that teaches by design can either be pedantic, and therefore most usually off-putting, or subtle and penetrating. A sublime teaching story enters the mind stream almost before the intellect has realized its meaning. We can be caught up in following the story line, while the story line is already changing our perception of reality. Those are the best, and we have those passed down to us throughout the ages. They are the holy books of all religions, the epics of each culture, and the folktales and nursery rhymes that live through word of mouth without even the need of literacy.

When we evoke the stories of such different world characters as Christ, the Buddha, Harriet Tubman, Ulysses, Wonder Woman, Harry Potter, and any other hero of any type, the story changes our state of mind and our physiology. When we follow the arcs of their lives we see a mirror of the blessings and curses of our own lives. We gather nourishment and learn essential warnings from the narratives of their lives.

We can follow Christ’s life and personally relate to his adolescent awakening to the power to throw off corrupted authority. If we later learn that this version of Christ’s life was fabricated as early Christian propaganda by a zealous disciple called Paul, we nevertheless irrationally remain inspired. It is not in the facts but in the truth of adolescent individuation that his story is now our story, and it emboldens us to throw off the perceived corruptions of our parents to find our own way. We can emotionally relate to the betrayal by his disciple, as we weep over our own betrayals and betrayings. We suffer his crucifixion as we recognize we are unseen by our society and peers. We rejoice in his ascension as we take heart in our own capacity for renewal and new beginnings.

From stories about the Buddha and Harriet Tubman we discover how a previously sheltered prince and a hardy slave both found the fortitude needed to escape their radically different imprisonments to answer the call of freedom. We see in their life stories extremely individual ways of serving others. The Buddha uses his profound insight to point to the peace accompanying nonattachment. Harriet Tubman personifies the resolve necessary for attaining physical freedom and assisting others in attaining the same. Though their stories are fundamentally different from each other, each points us to revelation and fortitude available in our own story.

With Ulysses we see how easily even the strongest intentions of our conscious wills can be led astray by siren songs of all kinds. With Wonder Woman or Harry Potter we feel the thrill of the possibility that the mystery of life can be channeled through our personal power, and regardless of our mistakes and humanness, we too can discover and live up to our talents.

All stories show us facets of ourselves waiting to be revealed. If we assume that our personal heroes show us our own favored identities and emerging inner qualities, we can also see that villains and minor characters likewise reveal aspects of ourselves. The most indelible stories endure throughout the centuries because they reveal to us that we are wise and good as well as ignorant and villainous.

We are inspired and cautioned by stories. We learn something about our relationship to time by hearing our mother read The Poky Little Puppy enough times. We realize the great follies of our vanity and misused power from the universal epics. From Shakespeare, Homer, and Faulkner we learn what failure is, what perseverance means, how the choice of an instant can doom or save a person’s or a nation’s life. Science fiction stories reveal that the choice of an instant can even threaten all life-forms.

We are entertained by stories in movies and books, in gossip and in scripture. Stories are the vehicle and proof of the power of language. They are the central jewel in the crown of language. We are manipulated by the stories we hear over and over, as well as the stories we read and reread, and tell and retell. Mostly we are swept along with the prevailing cultural or subcultural stories and their definitions of who we are both as a group and as individuals. We may believe the latest reasons for war, the necessity of working more even with less reward, and the approaching apocalyptic end of the world, or we may be in rebellion against these typical and current cultural story lines. Either way, it is the predominant cultural narrative that forms the polarity of reference points. We may study the ways of propaganda in our schoolrooms, but the subtlety of the cultural story often leaves us blind to our personal contribution to and entanglement in that group narrative.

What we are often mostly unaware of, as we absorb the stories around us, is the structure and message of the story we are living. More often we use the stories of our past and present cultural heritage to avoid fully recognizing the story that lives through us. We may be aware of our particular triumphs or miseries, but we rarely have a perspective or overview of how our story has served to define us. If the story is in a phase of failure, we usually accept the definition that we are failures. If the story turns toward success, then we are successes, although perhaps haunted by the earlier definition of failure. We may be telling ourselves of our success and fearing failure, but normally we do not recognize the possibility of not being defined by any particular story line. We are less free to the degree that we consciously or unconsciously accept these definitions.

How can we live lives, which most certainly are stories, and yet not be defined by these stories? We can be free in the story of ourselves; we can live free of any definition of ourselves. That freedom rests on the recognition of the nature of change and changelessness. Usually we either long for or fear change. And change is the nature of any story. Lasting freedom and fulfillment are only found in changelessness. The changeless is the conscious, silent awareness that is present regardless of any turn of events, regardless of any clothing. If we overlook changeless, silent awareness, we overlook that which is already free of all bondage, free of any definition of freedom.

Rather than focusing our attention and judgment on change as the obstacle to recognizing the changeless, we can use our stories and their changing events as catalysts to reveal the changeless substratum. We begin with stories and the definitions they generate so that we can use the discomfort that often accompanies them to evoke true questioning. True questioning pulls our attention deeper into ourselves, under the story lines and definitions into the core.

In seemingly mysterious and sometimes unwanted ways, our particular story is also expressing exactly what we need to face if we want to deepen our experience of life. When we recognize what the essential thrust of our life reveals, we can begin to see how the present rendition of our story also offers the essential wisdom needed to evolve into the next phase. Our stories are often ruthless in their insistence on particular lessons. When we are willing to remove the judgments of particular aspects of our story, even if those judgments are legitimate, we have the opportunity to learn in a fresh and unexpected way. In that learning we are unhindered by definitions of right or wrong, even though right and wrong may have been essential elements to the story.

Stepping back and viewing your story from a larger perspective can at least disengage your entanglement with your story. Personally, at a certain point of oversaturation with my own story, I had to stop formulating and believing my story’s narrative. I had to at least take a break from myself! In that break I realized what a mess I was continuing to generate by how I defined myself and others. I could learn from my mistakes and start afresh, but first I had to stop crying. The crying stops instantly when there is no story to evoke it.

All of history is the record of alliances and conflicts with one another’s stories. Our human history is proof of both the fragility and final unreliability of definitions we have lived under. Enemies become allies and then enemies again within a decade. Empires explode and implode, loving marriages dissolve in divorce, religions of peace become excuses for war. Our human history also points to what prevails regardless of our follies and complicities in horror. Conscious, aware life is still here. In you and in others, regardless of construction or destruction, life remains.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a pertinent teaching story for discovering our own nakedness. In this old tale, the emperor was swindled by some famous tailors to believe that he wore a suit of clothes so refined that only those of superior intelligence and worth would be able to see it. Of course he didn’t see any suit of clothes, as it did not exist, but since he didn’t want to appear lacking in intelligence and worth, he pretended to see it. In his pretense, he marveled at the beauty that would cover him and made plans for a parade among his subjects. Word got out about these refined clothes that could only be seen by the best of people, and people everywhere marveled to each other over the emperor’s new clothes as he paraded naked through the town. Only a small child, unaware of the consequences of being judged an inferior person, dared to call out, “The emperor is naked!” The emperor flinched, as somewhere deep inside he knew himself to be naked, but he covered his reaction quickly and continued his glorious parade in his gloriously nonexistent clothing.

If we are able to recognize the stories we weave, and recognize that they have no real substance, then we are closer to the innocent truth of ourselves. We can recognize the trance of being caught in belief that the story of the thing is the truth of that thing. We can recognize that even the grandest story is subject to unraveling. We can be willing to follow the discomfort of our inner flinch into the truth of our nakedness.

At this time in our present history we have the ability to be conscious of the stories we have been taught and how they define us, as well as the stories we have unquestionably believed about who another is. We can be willing to be naked to ourselves, and we can take responsibility for the result. We can marvel when we discover that the stories of previously demonized others (enemies) are as beautiful and multilayered as our own. We mature when we realize that some of the stories cherished as the foundation of our culture are flimsy and insubstantial in truth and are sometimes outrightly false. One generation’s true and defining story can be proved to be a lie in the next generation. Stories that celebrate freedom and revolution against tyranny can turn on themselves and become stories of reigns of terror.

We recognize the location of the story in our flesh and emotions. From this recognition choice is born. We have most often either chosen to continue the given story or to rebel against that story. Naturally we have been thrilled to realize that we can choose to live a different story, one we feel more in alignment with. There is yet another choice. We have the capacity to take a moment and release all stories. We can experience what it means to be nobody, uncovered even by our primary identity.

Underneath all the stories, we can experience that deep core of ourselves that is historyless, genderless, and parentless. Naked. That presence is unencumbered by relationships and has no past and no future. In the core of our beingness we are free of definitions. Unencumbered by our definitions, we experience ourselves as conscious intelligence aware of itself as open, endless space. This instant of being storyless is an instant of freedom. For even if our story is filled with light and beauty, to the degree that we define ourselves through that story, we are less free.

After such a moment, stories are never the same. They can be present, as they most likely will be, but they no longer have the inherent power to define our reality. The inner wealth that is available to us is no longer limited or augmented by particular inner or outer events. While the personality or the “creatureness” of each individual continues just as stories continue, the underlying awareness, the true “I,” has come home to itself.

After such a moment, choice is present, where we were blindly choiceless before. When we are not blinded by the stories that have been created for us, or the stories we create, we can appreciate the mysterious vastness that is holographically present in each moment of any story. We can discover what is and has always been here, throughout whatever rendition of story was being lived or believed. Each of us can take any story from our past, and we can discover the treasure that was hidden only through unquestioning belief in narrowly focused assumptions of the time. Stories can then be profoundly appreciated as displays of multidimensional life expressing itself in all forms.

How does a particular success or failure fit into the whole of your life story? We tend to focus on and magnify particular events, but if we see them as part of a continuum, we can see the trajectory of the arc of our life story. Seeing in this way does not mean attempting to take control of the story. Instead, this is an invitation to tell the truth about what your story has been teaching so far. It is an invitation to recognize how your story fits into the larger context of what is important now to you as a human being. It is an invitation to discover how awareness and inquiry naturally broaden, deepen, and expand your own story so that it demonstrates precisely what needs to be learned. Since stories both archetypal and banal ultimately teach us something, investigate what your story teaches. Regardless of where you are in your story—still at the beginning, the hopefully long middle, or near the end—what bigger story does your life story contribute to?

Just becoming more aware of the stories we live, along with their infinite plotlines and subplots, begins to wake us up. In lucid dreaming, we become aware of ourselves as both in the dream story and outside it. In lucid living, as in lucid dreaming, we are no longer tyrannized by the stories circulating around and inside us. The demon in the nightmare can be faced directly; the flying dream can be enjoyed in its ecstatic moment. As we face ourselves in our stories, we have space for perspective. We can stand back and see our personal story as part of a bigger whole.

What is your story? You discover your story by noticing what you are telling yourself over and over. Notice what you tell yourself about your past, your present, and your future. In order to have any lasting impact, our stories have to be told and retold. All stories have a narrative. Your narrative is what you tell yourself through thoughts and images with accompanying emotions. What is your narrative? You can check right now. It is bound to be familiar. It is natural as human animals with developed cognitive abilities to generate and follow the narrative of our stories. It certainly is not wrong to do so. But it is limiting. It limits attention to events that are forever changing. To discover how your attention is being spent, discover what you habitually say to yourself. Listen to your narrative while suspending belief in it.

There is great and mysterious power in knowing the potential gift of your life as a teaching story. This book is not written to teach you skills to create your version of reality. You are already doing that with your internal narrative. It is an invitation to be quiet and unidentified in the events that are appearing in and around your consciousness. In this quiet, there is a revelation impossible to discern if your attention is caught by the noise of identification. The revelation does not bestow greater power to create a better story. It is bigger than that. Revelatory power can take the events of your life as they are and show them as essential to your own awakening as well as your contribution to the awakening of all humanity.

It is a power that shifts the story line from one limited to “about me” to one about all. With that shift there is both a profound surrender and a closer attention to how all is unfolding. There is paradoxically a disidentification with any character and a truer welcoming of all aspects of each character.

In profound, redemptive stories there is a moment of surrender to a deep command of being. This is not esoteric. It is concretely grounded in all who live fulfilled lives, however their fulfillment may be described. Whether it be religious, artistic, scientific, or ordinarily personal, there is recognition of something unarticulated by intellect. Surrender to this is surrender to the consciousness of being rather than to the conditioned structure of thought. With this deep and true surrender, stories shift in their perspective. With this shift you are no longer veiled from yourself. You are no longer bound by whatever inner or outer definitions may appear in your life story. All definitions and stories arise from the silent core, and in surrender all are then pointers to where they come from and where they return at their end. In surrender all is transparent from the luminosity of your naked self.