This idea is neither new nor unique. Most all of us have heard some version of this statement. Rarely, however, do we take time to really explore this idea. What does that statement REALLY mean? Is it possible that a deeper understanding will provide an opportunity to enhance our day to day experience of life? Wouldn’t that be fun!
When we as energetic beings manifest in this physical form in this plane we are forced into linear time. As a result, we must create a linear existence, a timeline that defines the boundaries of our experience. We must define a past, and we must play along with the idea that the past precedes the future.
Once the switch is thrown and the lights come on, we begin this creation. There are an infinite number of events and experiences that occur from which we can choose to create our timeline, the story of ‘us’. We use our story to define ourselves. We use that story to interact with others, with the world at large. Every interaction we have is colored by and filtered through the lens of the story. From our relationships with other people in our life all the way to our fundamental experience of the world around us, our story is constantly creating our experience. We give our power to the story. In doing so, we allow the story to create our experience. Unfortunately far too often we become married to that story. We lose sight of the boundary between us and our story. We allow the story to create us, forgetting that we are the creators of the story. We become more story than person.
It’s easy to imagine how this process shapes our future. Our story convinces us that we’re not smart enough, not attractive enough, or any of a multitude of ‘enoughs’ to find and live our passion. We sell ourselves short, having bought into the limitations imposed on us by our stories. We struggle with feelings of inauthenticity, inadequacy. We incorporate into our story messages received from advertisers about what is attractive, what is important, what will make us successful – overlooking the fact that these messages are designed to make us feel lacking in some way. That trick only works if we empower the story that tells us that we are somehow ‘not enough’. If that seed of lacking is not planted and nurtured, the idea of “I’m not (good, pretty, smart, rich…) enough” can’t exist. This process of weaving messages from outside sources with questionable motives into our story of us is ongoing. Even messages from our loved ones – especially messages from our loved ones – should be examined closely before we allow them to become part of our story.
For any group to coexist successfully there must be some mutually agreed upon set of foundational behaviors that are deemed ‘appropriate’. This applies to any and every group to which an individual belongs, from family to neighborhood and community up to nation-state and even species.
The details of which behaviors are deemed to be good and which are labeled as bad is irrelevant. Various religious texts provide excellent examples of a few of mankind’s attempts to outline the ‘rules’. By adhering to these norms, the overall chance of success for the group as a whole and its members is maximized.
It doesn’t take much contemplation to understand the importance of this structure within a group. As a parent, it was my responsibility to my son to inculcate him with a working knowledge of the rules. If one spends any amount of time contemplating this idea, it becomes quite clear that very few behavioral rules are actually necessary- and almost all of those are some derivation of “be nice”.
I challenge everyone to spend an hour interacting with the world through the eyes of a child. Make note of just how many messages you receive telling you which behaviors are good, which are not so good, what you should want, what you should look like, etc. etc. We are inundated with these instructions. Sometimes the messages are obvious. Others are so subtle as to be easily missed. We are programmed in large part in our culture by mass media. Television PROGRAMMING is an incredibly efficient tool for shaping the minds of the masses. More insidious are the messages we receive from those we are led to believe have our best interest at heart.
As a parent, one has near-constant access to their young child’s mind, which is designed to be incredibly malleable and receptive in the early years. With this near unlimited power to shape the child’s story of him or herself comes much responsibility. In the best-case scenario a parent teaches the child, both by their word and by their own behaviors, an unbiased understanding of the foundational behavioral norms of their group.
Read that again, slowly. An unbiased understanding of the basics.
One can clearly understand the potential impact on our individual stories of the multitude of messages to which we are exposed. We are rarely aware of just how deeply we weave absolutely non-essential messages into our story. Perhaps more worrisome is our lack of awareness of the volume of non-foundational messages that we spew out into the world. Every bit of that detritus is ripe for the picking, ready to be gathered by our audiences and woven into their story. Neither the shape of my child’s body, nor his elementary school athletic prowess will have any impact on the success of our family. Those attributes do not qualify as foundational behavior issues. Messages that address non-foundational issues are not only unnecessary, they are often harmful when incorporated into a child’s story.
How does one determine whether a certain behavior or attribute qualifies as ‘foundational’? While there are no hard and fast rules, most truly foundational issues are non-comparative in nature (e.g “don’t kill”, “don’t take what’s not yours”, “be whatever it is that we’ve agreed to be that defines nice”) as opposed to the comparative nature of most non-foundational issues (“be richer”, “be smarter” – each carries an implied comparison to someone else).
The true toxicity of those comparative messages only becomes clear when we realize that the idealized standard used to compare, to judge, doesn’t exist. It can’t exist in and of itself because … why? Because we create it from whole cloth. We create it on the fly. WE create a fantasy and then proceed to pummel our children with said fantasy in a vain attempt to smush them into that mold and force them into becoming OUR idealized version of who they should be. An idealized version that is ever-changing. Honestly, what could go wrong with that approach?
What we don’t appreciate is that this very same process that shapes and defines our future also creates our past. Despite what we’ve been led to believe, time is not linear. Time is circular, it’s nonlinear, it repeats, it skips, it jumps. Time is what we make it. We created the idea of that thing we call time, and then we gave it attributes and characteristics that we now take to be immutable.
The events/experiences that we choose to weave into the tapestry that tells the story of who we are and how we became this version of us are plucked from a collection we call memory. We wander through our personal Dollar Memory Store finding shiny trinkets that catch our interest at that particular moment and throw them in our shopping cart. What we choose is influenced by a myriad of factors. If I’m hungry, if I’m sad, scared, nervous, excited – different shopping choices. Never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry, right?
We assume that the items we pick are a true representation of what actually happened. Yet that’s not how memory works. Our memories are attempts at recreation. Obviously we can’t actually, physically re-experience the heartbreak of the loss of our first love. So we recreate the experience, bringing forth what we believe actually occurred. Yet when the event was happening in real-time, our experience of it as it was unfolding was colored by and filtered through the lens of our story at that point in time. We weave that strand of yarn into the tapestry – colored and textured as it was by the story that was in place at that point in time. Thus our experience of the event, which we presumed to be a true experience of that event, was fictitious in the first order.
As I mentioned, what we call memories aren’t real. There is no personal storage cloud where we can upload our experiences and then have access to the originals at some later date. Memories are created in the moment. As such, it can only be that our creation of any ‘memory’ is going to be colored by and filtered through our story at the point in time of its creation. See the problem here? Our stories have changed between the last time we created that specific memory and our story now, at the moment we ‘retrieve’ the memory. Different story – different us. We are, by definition, a different person from one moment to the next. We faithfully, but with significant creative license, recreate an experience that didn’t actually happen the way we think it happened. We then use that new, upgraded memory to reinforce our current story. We plug faulty data into our magic Memory Retrieval Creator Machine, believing with our very essence that what comes out is Truth. We then go forward so smug in our faith that we know what really happened. Every time we engage in the act of ‘remembering’ we further degrade the accuracy of the data. As we can see quickly, the errors increase exponentially. Within one or two ‘rememberings ’, what we create bears little, if any, resemblance to the initial (error-filled) event.
Let’s complicate this further. Imagine there exists a Truth Machine. This non-human machine exists outside anyone’s and everyone’s story. It displays nothing but The Truth of any event, unsoiled by any biased influence. Now imagine two people independently experiencing the same event- for this experiment let’s assume they each witness the same car accident that didn’t directly involve either observer. If we were to watch a replay of each observer’s ‘truth’ of what occurred and compare it to the Truth Machine, what do you think we’d discover? We would be astounded by the differences between Observer A’s truth, Observer B’s truth and The Truth. Adding direct involvement in the event by either or both people will magnify the differences.
No two people’s experience of a shared event overlap fully. With our newfound understanding of the ‘story’ story, we immediately recognize that this is, by definition, an impossibility. Yet every story-person present for the event will be ABSOLUTELY SURE, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that their experience is the correct experience; that they have The Truth on their side.
How much discord in your life – from your closest relationships all the way up to the level of relationships between governments – is created by this effect?
EVERY BIT OF IT.
The more power we give to our story, the harder we will fight to defend it. We will literally sacrifice our very existence in defense of our story. Think about that. We are willing to give up the most sacred gift – the gift of this existence- in defense of something no more real than some crappy Indie movie. Really? You bet.
As I mentioned earlier, we must have some kind of story to define our experience as we navigate through this earthly manifestation. That’s one of the rules of this game, of this experience. But here’s the fun part…remember when you learned the rules for this game? You do remember that, right? Of course, you don’t! Why can’t you remember the damn rules? For the simple fact that no one has ever given you a copy of the rules.
Read that again, slowly.
No one has ever been given a rulebook for this game. Here we are, playing the most important game ever created without a rule book in hand. Most of us can’t get through a game of Sorry! without referring to the rules at least once or twice, yet we’re somehow okay with playing this most precious game; a game that we only get to play once -no practice runs, no mulligans, no ‘re-do’s’, no dress rehearsals, without knowing the rules.
There are methods available through which one can discover the sacred rules for this game. While that’s a topic for another day, I will share one important part of the Rule Book of Life: Nowhere is it written that we can’t change our story! It’s the ultimate cheat code for the game of life. Don’t want to be Colonel Mustard in your personal game of Clue? anymore? Awesome. Be Miss Scarlet and celebrate your new story.
We are always free to change our story. You have experienced an infinite number of events from the moment you turned on the projector in the movie theater that is your life. Who knows why you chose whatever events you chose to create the tapestry that is your story. Why not choose different experiences? Follow me here – if I go back and choose a different experience, that experience and each subsequent experience will, BY DEFINITION, be colored by and filtered through a different story. Instead of choosing for my story every instance where I thought my partner was not being what I wanted them to be, what if, instead, I chose every instance where they were more than I could have hoped for to create my story? What if that became the lens, the filter through which I experienced my partner? Imagine the impact that would have on my relationship with my partner. Now imagine if I went through that same process with every relationship in my world…
That’s the power of our story. We can choose, and therefore create, the flavor of our life. We can choose to be mired in a morass of pain and unhappiness just as easily as we can choose an experience defined by joyful love.
There’s only one catch. Whether we are aware of it or not – we are ALWAYS choosing our past, our present, and our future. We can’t opt-out of choosing. There is no default setting.
Let that sink in for a minute. Since we have no option BUT to be the architect of our experience, why would we ever choose to create an unfulfilling experience? Viewed another way – if the experience we have created thus far isn’t so fun, why do we remain committed to maintaining it in its current form?
Continue to reshape our stories and before one can say “years of therapy”, we are no longer required to struggle with our deepest fears – fears of abandonment, of inadequacy.
Because those fears were never real to begin with.