Spirituality

Dear Amir, 

Oddly, I have been thinking a great deal about your question recently.  The more I think about it, the more I have come to believe that we are to borrow a phrase from writer Mike Murphy,   we are “profoundly and mystically creatures of story.”  Or as our father would sing it “we are the stories that we tell”.  

On a simple level almost everything that we know comes to us through a story of some sort.  Our identity is a quilt of interwoven stories told by our family, our society, our culture, our media and the stories that we tell ourselves.  Our memories are a series of stories – narratives. We are both the narrators and the lead characters of our life’s story.   

The great story-teller Isaac Bashevik Singer wrote “When a day passes it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, we would live like beasts—only for the day. Today, we live, but by tomorrow today will be a story. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.”

But stories are tricky.  They can connect or disconnect us.  We can tell stories (gossip) about people to shame them or hurt them.   Stories can deceive us or cause us to desire things that are destructive to our souls.  Stories can be in Dylan’s language  “advertising signs that con you in to thinking you’re the one that can do what’s never been done that can win what never’s been won, meanwhile life goes on all around you”

Meditation taught me that I was constantly creating my own personal reality through the stories I told about my  By paying attention to the stories that I was telling myself, I began to realize that they were only one set of stories among millions of other stories I could tell. I started to become the conscious narrator of my story.  

It is only when are gain the freedom to imagine and create the stories of our lives that we grasp the key to our liberation.  It is our creative and artistic consciousness that allows us to imagine new stories and escape from being a character in (the often tragic) storyof our lives.

At this point the story becomes enters the mystical-rabbit hole.  Our life, all of life, becomes a story telling itself. 

We are the characters and the story-teller at once.  Our minds have evolve to communicate the story of the universe.  We write books on quantaum physics, we sing songs about love, we draw great spirit maps on the walls of our temples, we scribble private diaries and draw notes in the margins of our notebooks. We are consciousness telling the story of itself.

Walt Whitman looking up at starry sky wrote:

When we become the enfolders of those orbs/ And the pleasures and knowledge of everything in them/ Sall we be satisfied then?/And my spirit answered NO, we but level that lift/To pass and continue beyond.

We are the poets of an expanding and evolving universe. We are its product and we are its voice.   We sing its song, which the song which is the song of our expanding and evolving consciousness. On the most basic level we are creatures of story.  

Our conscious mind, connects us to a non-dual awareness that is the source of our creativity.  When we get our doubting, neurotic mind out of the way we can tap into it and the story of the universe flows through us. We become the story-tellers of universe. 

And not only do we tell the story, but we re-write it.  Our creativity shapes the world around us.  We build temples and paint murals. We build bombs and tanks. We make movies and write symphonies. We convince people to kill and fight. Connected to the immense power of our creativity, our stories have begun to shape not only our fate, but the fate of our tiny corner of the universe. We have built the weapons that can destroy us and most life on earth.  We have built the technology to save life and to allow it evolve in unimagined new directions.  And so we must choose our stories carefully. 

Let us tell stories of love.  Let our stories open the minds and hearts of other sentient beings to their beautiful mind, nested as it is in non-dual mind.  Let our stories help them be conscious and creative story-tellers themselves.  

The songs of the biblical poets touched the mind of Rumi or who sparked the soul of Walt Whitman who taught Bob Dylan how to sing who inspired our Father.  Which inspired you to draw neurotic homunculi,  that have inspired me to draw mediations on light and dark, that in turn motivated you to teach a good class.

What will that class inspire in one sleepy, grumpy,obstinante tenth grader?

That is the story of life telling itself.  

I don’t know if you remember the drawing that I did of a womb. On one side there was the umbilical chord tissue made of cells, made of DNA, made of atoms, made of quarks, made of dancing vibrating strings of probability which vibrate like guitar strings leaping in and out of being in a mysterious orchestra which underpins all of reality.  On the other side were the words and letters that are the building blocks of our collective consciousness our ability to tell the story of the universe.  

And this part I don’t understand so well, but for some reason, I believe that on a quantaum level our consciousness is theconducter of this orchestra. Or maybe not ( : 

But the paradox returns on itself.  Most people would look at what I wrote above and not really be interested in it all.  The only way to grab people’s attention and really make them understand something mystical is to tell them a good story.  Everybody loves a goodstory, because in some way we are all playing hide and seek with God (our mystical nature) and the story is the peek-a-boo moment.   

So good luck my brother.  You are a great teacher.  You have been a great teacher to me.  You stories are rich and earthy like the compost you love to smell.  They flow through your Bashevis Singer Jewish steam of consciousness brain and come through your enormous beautiful heart.  

Good luck with your class – tell me how it went.