State of Being
and state of Doing
both coexist within the same human being
We are called “human beings”
while in reality we should more accurately be called “human doings”

We have a love / hate relationship with “being”
We love birth
but we dread death;
we love pleasure
but we abhor pain
yet, all of these are unavoidable aspects of life

That aspect of us
which is the pure experiencer
has no memory, no recollections of good or bad, joy or sorrow
in fact, it is inherently imbued
with a quality of forgetfulness

On the other hand, the storyteller,
part of the same psychological complex that is involved in “doing”
is the one with the memories and filters
from which good or bad stories can be spun

Language and thought are nothing
if not storytelling
whether its the external use in social context
or as internal thoughts in our private theatre of mind

We take the vast input of the totality of all our sensory experiences
combined with all our inner experiences of thoughts and feelings
and filter out a very narrow selection of stories out of that
stories we identify with
and which define us
define our “I”, our “ego”,
our self

Since we’ve been born
we have all been socially indoctrinated
into the class of doing
and the class of storytelling

In modern society
this storytelling choice has taken away from us from birth and even before
Language is forced upon us
by parents and a noisy world
that constantly rain down words
while we are still within the womb
and of course, when we exit it

And so we grow up
listening to the stories of others
and begin developing our own storytelling skills
which manifest externally as language
and internally as thoughts

Before too long
we cannot remember a time
when we did not tell stories
when we did not think, speak or listen

We grow up so indoctrinated by storytelling
believing that it is the space in which we must exist
that we disregard the more fundamental space
of quietude, presence and pure being

We superimpose an artificial state and enthrone it
whilst the more fundamental state is continually minimized and misunderstood

The tragedy of modern life
is that the very success of this doing mind
which creates such material wealth
and libraries upon libraries of intellectual riches
causes us to create greater distance
from our more fundamental state of being
for doing itself, storytelling itself
is a manifestation of this pure being

How many of us
can answer the question
“what are we, if our ideas of ourselves and the world are gone?”

How many of us fear Alzheimer disease
for this very thought?…this very story?
Yet, each and every one of us must contend with this question
for at the time of death
this is the greatest fear we must confront
…the story of the end of our storytelling self
and it’s rich, lifetime worth of collected tales

Our storytelling self
with all it’s fanciful stories
of science, religion or whatever framework constructed upon symbology
will never be able to find peace and resolution with the experiencing self
That can only come about
by speaking the language of the experiencing self itself
which is not a language at all,
not storytelling at all
but rather, the state of pure awareness

Yet this is an exceedingly difficult, impossible for most
because the storytelling self
holds such a monopoly of fear upon its dominion of experience
that to let go of it’s own learned storytelling nature
is, in it’s view, tantamount to suicide

We have become so conditioned to chatter
that to stop it
is a feeling of death
So we must continually talk, continually think, continually feed the intellect
continue the flow of this nervous energy to avoid silence
like a caffeine junky who must continue to do
and where boredom is a defense mechanism against being

The storyteller so enjoys the stories it weaves about itself,
sees these stories as what intrinsicically define it
and as what differentiates it from other animals
who we project as not having this rich story life
We find these stories so enticing
that we find it impossible to relinquish them
yet, in the end
relinquish them we must!

We all seek freedom
yet the very freedom we seek
we ourselves block
by labelling and mistaking this freedom
as the ultimate object of fear

When we search for happiness
and set out in the wrong direction
it is little wonder that few will ever find it