Ernie Thayer

We humans are so tied to our sense that we are individuals living in time, so we live out the stories we write, consciously or not, about who we are, what’s happening and our place in it all. The story of “Me and My Life” – the endless attempt to plot a “good life” which we assume we’re in charge of. Hell of a story!

There are underlying pillars of our personal and collective stories that they all share, such as our existence as individuals, the reality of time & space, the need to pursue happiness (however defined), the reality & inevitability of struggle, loss, grief and suffering. These underpin our stories and are the subtexts of all our dramas, in life and reflected in our entertainment.

We have taken the stories to be real & true. They aren’t. But the struggle and drama that befall us because we believe them are real enough.

So what? Well, all that struggle and hurt for one thing – when will we get tired of that? For another, the focus on story prevents us noticing what is actually going on outside the story line.

And what’s that? It’s the here & now beauty of the earth, and the deep recognition of the horrors that belief in human stories create. I often imagine the appropriate horror in a little girl of 5 or 6 watching someone beat a child or animal. She is mostly innocent of the underlying story and sees instead the nasty reality of its consequences.

It is clearly possible to see all this, like that child, as obvious and troublesome if one isn’t deceived or blinded by the considerable taint of storytelling. Yet most all of us buy in unwittingly, innocently, but disastrously.

Must we?

No. But to end the madness, storytelling has to be questioned and confronted, even its fundamentals.

I wanted to flesh out a little of what it is we’re missing. What is actually going on when story is absent? Well, everything else! Children know. The natural world does not need story. Morning dew, color, crashing waves, smiles, beauty, love, the play of light, breezes, winks, anthills and sky – always sky. The sense of touch, delicious sound, a swelling heart, starry nights, endless fascination and wonder. No story required. Story is a mental overlay, and an unnecessary one. In story, we’ve lost touch with all that except as decoration for the story of ‘me and my life’.

It’s fun to get curious about our stories and their impact. The results can be rich beyond measure. Of course if you lose your stories. . .who would you be?

Warning: curiosity killed the cat.

The most striking, and seemingly absurd, aspect of awakening is the discovery that there is no one inside the mind-body.

Everything in our culture, our rearing and our assumptions about ourselves & human life holds that we are individual, separate people.

There is absolutely no evidence of this.

Sounds crazy, huh? What about the entirety of scientific knowledge saying otherwise? And isn’t it just obvious that we are separate persons?

The greatest difficulty in seeing the truth of this is that once the sense of separation has been accepted, innocently if wrongly, and from a very early age, then everything else is seen as outside of ourselves. So this seems to validate our error.

That’s how we are deceived. The belief is self-confirming. So-called reality will appear as it is believed to be. This is conditioned into a child early on so it arises innocently. And so much of experience appears that way – an inside self witnessing an external world.

All of this happens in thinking. Thought is a fragmenting, dual making function. Thinking in a pattern easily becomes belief (though it doesn’t have to), one thought saying another one is true.

So thinking is ideal for creating (out of thin air and consciousness itself) an entire universe and in particular the initial separation idea that animates our self-deception.

In my office I keep a large photograph of the face of a child of a few months. The picture represents awareness before thought is conditioned to believe one is an individual – an absolute limitation onto limitless Consciousness. There is only a soup of experience before thinking and belief arrive and with them the sense of an inner identity and the naming of things “out there”. The young child represents a more natural state of being than that of a ‘normal’ adult witnessing a world “out there”.

One could say that what we see in an infant is enlightened, but it is just a state pre-thought, before conditioning. Enlightenment is the rediscovery of that state after thought has solidified a sense of self, now discovered to be imaginary. Separate identity collapses in the face of reality (there was never such a self). How this could come about is dealt with elsewhere in this blog.

What’s fascinating is that this experience of self is only from thought’s point of view. Indeed all the experiences that follow from that primary separating belief are also only real from that point of view. And what experiences are those? Our entire daily life in time and space! An ordinary life is one looking for happiness or fulfillment – later.

In fact, the mind-body is an appearance within Consciousness, not the other way round. Seeing the truth of this is not easy as it requires peering underneath thinking and belief. Doing so allows us to realize that all we actually know of minds, bodies and worlds is the very knowing itself. Only unnamed experience, as for an infant.

So it’s one hell of an ask to even suspect what’s actually going on unnoticed!

It could be the death of me.