Personal Stories
The Footprints on the Road
The narrow forest path starts seemingly in the middle of nowhere. At first, there is nothing that even resembles a path, but at some point, it simply appears and winds through the trees. Vaguely it proceeds through the forest. The path starts growing wider and more distinct, and when it arrives at the edge of the treeline, an entirely different world opens in front of it. The path becomes more definite, as many unseen destinations appear on the horizon.
The journey towards unknown lands starts small. Very soon, the path becomes a road. The road winds through myriad landscapes—over the hills, through the fields, beneath the majestic mountains, and through the deepest valleys. The road continues its journey to the most distant horizons before disappearing into the deep orange sunset.
Some footprints appear on the dusty surface of the road. They are only seen when looking backward. No one knows where and why they have emerged, but looking behind, it feels inevitable that the footprints are there. What is also obvious, is that the footprints on the road are whispering stories of the past journey.
The road is enchanted by the footprints because such traces feel like the very purpose of the road. Without anyone to walk on it, the road would not have very much meaning for its existence. The road merges with the footprints and the various stories they tell. It becomes the journey that has been left behind. Plunging into the memories of the past, the footprints seem like the only proof of the road’s route through time. Without them, the grass would not be worn away, and the path would have never been made. Without regular footprints, the grass would soon regrow; the forest would reclaim the path for itself.
However, what is not so obvious is that the road has appeared from nowhere and will eventually disappear into nothing. Throughout the whole journey, winding across the lands, it has always been under the same blue sky and seen the same light of the infinite stars above. Without the road, the footprints could never appear on its surface, and without the footprints, there would be no road.
The Origins of the False Identity
We have a curious sense of identity—the conceptual ‘I’ within—which is mostly an accumulation of footprints on the road behind us. It is based on stories we have accumulated during our life so far. Stories are selected and symbolic memories of our past, which we mirror to an unknown future, making our future similar to our past.
As small children, when we learn our first word, the meaning of it is limited to one single object. The word begins to symbolize that object. We practice using it and learn to explain it to ourselves and others. Sometimes we are corrected and our knowledge of the symbol changes. Sometimes it is accepted, and our understanding of the symbol grows stronger. The more we use the word to symbolize the object, the more meaning it accumulates through the feedback we receive. Those meanings are the footprints on the road.
Thinking through words profoundly affects our behavior. When we symbolize an object by using a word, we usually think of the word instead of really observing the object itself. When we hear the word 'flower', we immediately plunge into our own mental images of the flower; it might be red, white, beautiful, spiky, tall, thin, bleak, appealing. Any mental images and presumptions the mind holds for the flower define our attitude toward the actual flower when it is observed. In the same way, our symbolic memories define our actions in any given situation. The vocabulary we have accumulated has a significant effect on our life.
We can describe our whole life in one word. A single word can carry countless historical causes and effects. One word can invoke a sense of justice or injustice in us. A simple word can destroy everything we call life, or it can create a level of well-being that we have never achieved before. When we derive our sense of identity from words, we define the ‘I’ through all the meanings those words carry within. Such meanings are mostly generated by other people who have gone before us, even though they feel like our own. They are stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves.
We all live different life stories. They feel unique for us, even though they share much with other people’s life stories. They are stories of pleasures and sufferings, of happiness and unhappiness, and they feel vivid and real, but we are not our life stories, in the same way the footprints on the road are not the road itself.
The changing world constantly begs us to think again and again, and to renew our state of being. However, we mostly use the possibility of thinking only to repeat our past and to think through our conditioning. In the center of that repetitive hurricane of thoughts is the false identity that bears the name ‘I’.
A Life of Waves and Ripples
Our stories are only ripples and waves on the surface of an ocean. If we focus on being just a wave, the whole ocean is easily forgotten. The waves are but expressions and forms of the vast ocean. Likewise, our personal stories are expressions of who we are, but they do not convey who we essentially are.
Our lives seem to be made up of a series of waves, from the largest tsunami to the smallest ripple. We carry big stories that define our life situation and small stories which are more hidden but often merge into the big stories, gaining strength from their synergy with each other. The stories carry the ephemeral nature of our thoughts, and they rise and fall like the waves of the ocean. Occasionally they billow with a great force, and at times they move very gently. When different situations arise in our life, the stories gain more strength, like a wave traveling towards the shore grows stronger as the water becomes more shallow.
Small stories are descriptions of the everyday events we take for granted. They might only last a few seconds before becoming a thing of the past. Small stories arise from seemingly insignificant things—someone did something we think they should not have done; someone said something which hurt us so quietly that we dare not speak of it aloud; someone forgot something that we think should have been remembered; someone said something to others about us which we did not want anyone else to know.
Small stories usually have their foundations in a bigger story that silently precedes them. While the mind creates small stories from seemingly insignificant events, it also establishes a wider narrative that profoundly affects our life situation. The ripples and waves go hand in hand, strengthening one another, and together creating the visible surface of the ocean.
Bigger stories might last for weeks, months, or years. They could even last a lifetime and have the power to filter down through the generations. Big stories are habits by which we live our daily lives. They manifest themselves everywhere: “We are an oppressed culture in a foreign land.” “We are a minority which the majority does not consider worthy as human beings.” “We are educated, which makes us more civilized and intellectually superior in comparison to other people.” “We are benefactors because there is so much malevolence in the world.” “We are warriors of the world-weariness because it is our responsibility to fight the suffering of mankind.” “We are vegetarians disapproving of carnivores.” “We are carnivores disapproving of vegetarians.”
We derive our identity from living the big stories day after day. When identifying with our stories, we cannot perceive them rising and falling, because we are that rising and falling. We have become the stories of the mind and all the meanings they hold within.
When focusing only on the surface of the ocean, we forget that we are the ocean. The surface is only an impossibly thin layer which rests between the air and the ocean; it is an illusion that does not exist.
The Story of the Little Me
The greatest story humanity ever created is the inner narrative which bears the name ‘I’—a feeling of intelligence behind the eyes that is separate from the unintelligent, unknown, and often hostile world around it. It is the ‘I’ that has the sole purpose of survival either individually or as a part of a collective. The story of the little me is well put in a poem by A.E. Housman: “I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” Fear arises easily because we feel we do not have control over our life. We feel we have been cast into a world of someone else’s creation. The ‘I’ then becomes a reflection of that fear, defining our intimate relationships, our employment status, our success, our victories and defeats, our causes and effects. However, all reflections are illusory in nature; even though they seem real, they are but a dream.
Our life revolves around the main character of the dream, circling and repeating the central theme over and over again in different forms. The main character usually has very little knowledge of what happens and why. The core message of the dream remains hidden, yet it relentlessly pushes through into the dreamer’s awareness in myriad forms. Similarly, we have no idea why things are happening the way they do. Even the best attempts to rationalize things cannot but scratch the surface. The story of the ‘I’ is a construction of the past, but when looking at the past, it feels like a hazy dream, with only some selected memories arising here and there.
Most of the stories of the ‘I’ have targets, who are usually other human beings or groups of people. They can be our enemies, our benefactors, people close to us, believers in another religion, researchers of a different branch of science, or experts in another profession. The mind loves problems. Therefore, many of our stories are aimed at anyone who does not share the same values and beliefs with us. When we encounter such a person, the mind reactively produces an expectation based on the stories of our past.
The expectations are reflections of our identity, dictating our behavior towards other human beings. Through the mind-made expectations of others, we blindly establish our false sense of identity, the one that bears the name ‘I’. Our expectations are a statement of what we are. And we are unconsciously aiming our personal or collective story towards everything that we are not.
When we say we are Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Agnostics, Finnish, American, Russian, Chinese, the followers of this tradition or spokesperson for that system of thinking, we simultaneously tell ourselves a story of who we are not. Many religions and traditions hold the oldest stories, echoing across thousands of years before reaching the individual mind that is longing for some greater truth than itself. They have washed over humanity as a giant wave through time. As simple patterns of thoughts and beliefs, the stories might not be disapproving or judging anything, but as tools of the ‘I’ with its never-ending needs and often destructive behavior, suffering is prone to emerge in one form or another.
We live the life of the ‘I’ until something awakens us from the dream-like state. However, that something is not outside of us. The only thing that can awaken us from the dream is already within us. All external experiences, including our thoughts, are a mirror image of what we hold within. When we see this, we awaken from the slumber. As long as we search for any truth outside of us—from books, teachings, religions, traditions, gurus, opinions, science, art, or culture—we will continue to be led by the hallucination of the ‘I’.
Adopting Roles in the Great Play of Life
The ‘I’ is the main role in a great play, which contains endless stories within it. In William Shakespeare’s words: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.” These roles always have characteristics, which define how they tell their personal stories and how they receive stories from others.
The word person comes from the Latin root persona, meaning a character in a play, an actor’s mask through which the sound comes. The stories of our life create such a mask, and identifying with it makes us prone to a state of undefined personal suffering. We are not aware of the reasons we suffer because we are not aware of living in our stories. Such life leads us to unconsciously repeating our stories and the suffering they induce over and over again. We go around in circles in the pathways of life.
In new life situations, we stumble upon similar events that we have experienced before. Time after time, we find an incompatible partner in our intimate relationships because we unconsciously believe that this person will fulfill our story. We regularly drift into quarrels with other people because they don’t share the same opinions—certain feelings of righteousness—with us. We start wars because we feel someone has violated the borders of our collective sense of identity. We inherently see something good in negative experiences, because our narrative of the ‘I’ is a story where things have ended up positively. We accept differences because we have grown in an environment, where the difference has been a healing factor.
Stories create various states of mind—negative, positive, neutral, or undefined mental positions—upon which we build our daily lives. If we derive our sense of identity from these stories, we also unconsciously identify with those states of mind. For reasons ultimately unknown, all unconscious activity of the mind is prone to produce suffering. Our life becomes whatever we identify with, even the suffering.
Our roles and their stories in the great play of life create a misconception that we are somehow important, and this profound illusion holds within it a seed of suffering. However, we are not important. Our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are not important. Most importantly, our past stories are not important. The purpose of the mind-made stories is to assess the feeling of importance because without it, the very existence of the false identity would be threatened.
The only time we are important is in the present moment. The pure experience we have without any connection to time—neither to the past nor future—is the only important state of being in our life. Without it, life would not exist. Nothing happens separate from the present moment. Our past and future are only thoughts, which form as memories or expectations in the present moment.
True importance does not have causes or effects, and does not know victory or defeat. It does not include right or wrong, and it does not judge anything as good or bad. Above all, true importance is not attached to outcomes or results but participates wholeheartedly in the process as it is now. Such participation inevitably produces beneficial results.
The importance that requires nothing to justify its existence is like expressing love without terms, conditions, or requirements. It is the seed of pure and unlimited compassion, and it reveals to us the delusion of false importance that has been created by the mind—the hallucination we have come to know as the ‘I’. Whatever happens on the stage disappears when the mask of personality is taken off in the green room, when we really become aware of ourselves.
Presence is the Path to Liberation
The awareness of the self within needs a paradigm shift in our state of mind. It can naturally and spontaneously change only in the present moment, and the change does not rely on memories of the past or expectations of the future. It is not caused by our personality, but by a much larger picture. A true change in our mental position always serves the purpose of the entire world around us. However, we can never conceptually know what that purpose is. The only way to act is to ride along with the seemingly chaotic waves of the world. A change within only happens when we learn to trust the world around us and whatever it might bestow upon us.
Our life gains a deep feeling of purpose when we accept it in the same way as the leaves of a tree accept the wind. We cannot know where the wind is coming from or where it is going. If we do not trust in the wind we will start resisting it, and resistance always creates suffering for ourselves and others around us. Our inner resistance is futile because the winds of the world will take us with them no matter how hard we try to resist them.
When the story of the ‘I’ disappears, our resistance also goes. With the diminishing of the false identity, we spontaneously start to act in a way, which lets the world proceed in the direction that supports natural growth and evolution of all forms of life. This direction involves us as personas only through the mask of the actor, which is ultimately nothing serious or important.
Breaking free of our stories and automatic thoughts is not a journey we need to travel. It is not a path that eventually leads us to freedom. It is a freedom that happens continuously at the beginning of every single moment. That freedom cannot happen anywhere or anytime other than in the present moment. It is a new beginning initiated by every single breath we take, and there is not a grain of suffering within a beginning that has no history.
