We live by our Stories

I love to be enveloped into a good story. Movies, books, even campfire storytellers have such power over our consciousness, at least for a little while. We fall in. We are immersed so easily into a good and engaging the story. We love its characters. We see ourselves there. It’s our emotions that are begging to be triggered by the story. We want to believe. We want to feel! We want to experience. This is so much more than mere “entertainment.“

That’s how I felt listening to the ‘Dirty John” podcast and why it was so important to me personally to share with my husband and a few close friends. I wanted them to experience it and by doing so maybe they could experience what the story said about my own (because the two were so close). It was the story of my first marriage, though albeit much more severe, more melodramatic. But the feelings were identical. I wanted to be seen, to be known, to be understood. And by listening to that story, I felt understood.

We are all collections of our stories. We learn this way. Through every pain, every tragedy, every failure of character, we understand each other. We are like gods who must pretend to be “human“ (our concoction, our contrivances, our story) to learn these lessons. It is the tragic character we have to play, the roller coaster we have to live. No other way. We love it!

I know it’s all just part of the simulation, but I also know it’s these stories that are the connective tissue of our collective learning. We use the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, to bring these lessons into the light. Even though it’s only a kind of a dream, this life. It’s not really happening the way we think and believe it’s happening. No, not really. And THAT is the part of the story, the bigger story, the greater reality, which you’ll never believe when I tell you. My Plato‘s cave, you won’t believe me when I tell you that none of this is real. You’re not real, not the way you think you are. It’s a limited consciousness now, a narrow perspective, myopic, like only being able to see out of your peripheral vision. I think it’s the “brain tool” which filters out everything but the story, the experience of seeming real. I know this is true. I know it deep inside. I know it now, since the stairs, I know it with my whole heart, but I cannot prove it to you. I can only tell you the truth; it’s something you can feel, but I don’t really know how I know it.