The Story of Me & Meditation

 Autobiographies are great vanity projects, but they reveal a fundamental possibility and reality. We can create a story about ourselves.

Without going into any details about what a story is, it is sufficient just to note that stories tend to have central characters. And when we watch a film or listen or read a story we don't need to be introduced to the idea that there is a central character. The very structure of story telling does this.

Many stories play with this starting of about some unknown person only to reveal that the main character is that person. Angel Heart being one. One that threw me a kid was Omen II where Damien must discover that he is the Devil. We know this from the start as the film is named after him, but he does not. Discovering you are the main character of a story you don't even know about must be incredibly troubling especially when that character is the ancient angel of light.

When we are born of course we are born into a story created by our parents and society. And in the West the process of becoming an "individual" is working out which parts of this story we want, and which we don't and whether we want to add anything else.

But none of this is reality. The very reason why stories are so innate and we love reading and watching them all day long in films and NEWS stories is because our brains are wired like this. Our brain is made to create stories. And people expect that of us. When we meet a friend the starting stages of the conversation are often to create some "story" about ourselves to fill the gap since we last saw them. And in anything other than a causal encounter we start telling the "story of me". We work hard on this story constructing it in stages during our life. Some is given to us by our parents, and some we make up.

People expect the character in our story to be "the good guy." We never read s story where we are the bad guy. Even in a story where the main character kills people, the story never rejects them.

But in reality our "story of me" can often reject us. Things don't go our way and we start to hate the main character in our film. And it can go the other way and we start to love the character in our film.

But neither of these are real. It is just stories.

The #1 distraction from meditation is this "story of me." True we can get consumed in other stoires, like we hear about something happening and we can't stop thinking about it. That can distract meditation too. But invariably because that happening somehow affects me. Suppose there is a murder near our house, or someone we know does something bad. Its not the murder or the bad thing, they happen all the time, its the "near me" that matters. So its part of the "story of me." "You'll' never guess, we say, but last week on the corner of our block..." and this is part of the "story of me."

When we meditate there is only one reality, the one that is present now. That is the sensations as they occur now, and all the mental events as they happen now. When something is happening it is real, it is tangible, we don't have to imagine it, it is there for us to experience. Now is the only meaning of Reality. Everything else is imagination and belief.

In anapanasati our reality is the breath and all the subtle components of that entity. We watch it all very closely and get interested in the minutiae of this profound real thing.

From the perspective of definite, tangible Reality we can see that all the story telling is imagination. And we can see easily how our brain naturally creates stories and put main characters in there. And then it is easy to see how the main character we call "me" is made, and also how transparent and unreal they are.

This is quite a revelation when you are brought up to defend, protect, and nurture this "me" as though it was real.

Now when we realise things like this its easy to chuck everything out, This is "nihilism" and we need be careful. Just because "me" is a fabrication of the mind, does not mean that everything previously associated with me goes in the bin. Our body is still real and we need look after it. But it is no longer belongs to the central character of a film.