Telling Stories About Yourself

It seems to me that the understanding of the world that I've taken three decades to construct is an utter fiction. My mind chatters on about what is so, what is not so, what is expedient, and what is not, and for a very long time, I believed it. Most of the time, I still do. But more and more, I take pause, and think to myself "my God, what is all this nonsense"?

It starts at a very basic level. I assume I am a discrete entity. I assume the world around me is a discrete entity. I have political views, and assumptions about what other people think. I reminisce about a past that is half-forgotten and patched up with assumptions, and feebly try to imagine the future.

My mind is constantly spinning a story out of words, in a desperate attempt to add substance  to life--to try and give it form. Nothing that it says is true. If I care to look, I can see that consciousness, ergo self, ergo life is formless. And that the mind is caught in this habit would be fine...but that somehow, when these stories are believed in, they create a salient feeling of tension, unease, and dissatisfaction. 

When faced with these unpleasant feelings, I do what is natural and try to figure out a way to overcome them. I didn't always do this. When I was younger, I would lash out in anger and blame the world around me, which at the time, I was quite sure I was separate. After doing this a few ten thousand times, I began to notice that that when I projected anger outwards, that I would feel bad. Also, when I succeeded in hurting someone else, I could usually feel their hurt, too. To make matters worse, getting angry almost never, or never got me what I wanted. So, now I try to overcome negative feelings as they arise. 

But this is another trap. How can I overcome these feelings? The mind spins it's web. It argues this point or that point. It makes very good arguments. Sometimes it argues against acting rashly. Sometimes, when I am having a bad day, It makes very good arguments for acting rashly. Either way there is an argument being made. Thankfully, these days most of these internal dialogues get resolved within a few minutes. This is good progress from when I was a teenager, when I would carry on the debates for weeks, months, or even years. And yet I find this extremely worrisome that they are still going on. There is something in me that is milking these little dialogues for all the sour milk it can get.

For what purpose is all of this negative energy being harvested? I've read piles of books on dharma and contemporary spirituality, watched and listened to hundreds of hours of audio and video, from personalities from a variety of disciplines, and the consensus seems to be that, this conflict is needed to sustain the ego--the idea  of the self as something separate. The ego needs to be fed to maintain it's story. It feeds on conflict, because conflict perpetuates the fundamental fallacy that there is a "you" and there is a "the rest of the world".

Everything I believe is a lie. Because it is popular, because I've been bred to do it, and because there was no one there to tell me otherwise, I've come into the habit of clinging to isolated statements, and believing they have significance in an of themselves. Every statement is untrue. Even scientific statements are relative: humans cannot measure the universe objectively, because we cannot witness it objectively. The world as we perceive it is merely a reflection of our own nervous systems. Even that statement is untrue. There is no inherent truth in anything I've written here or anywhere. 

I am, for the most part caught in a never ending story about life. This story is constantly creating suffering, but instead of discarding the story, I created additional passages that justify the suffering; verses that pontificate various means to an end. And when the end doesn't come, the story says, "It will just be a little longer" and "aren't we making progress?" But the stories perpetuate themselves. What a joke! 

The hard truth is there is no ego. It is a fiction created and sustained by the self, which is the entire field of awareness. So all that pain, all that suffering that's in my life. That's me creating it. That's me sustaining it. That's me clinging to it ever hour. And I like to tell myself (and others) that enlightenment is something that takes discipline and devotion, and a particular disposition. It requires none of these things. It requires nothing, but the discontinuation of the story of "me".

So what's your story? What do you tell yourself you need to be happy in life?  How many friends? How many possessions? What degree? How many sexual partners? The romantic devotion of and attachment to exactly what kind of person? What job title? How much cold hard cash?

When you get it, will any of that supersede the story of the ego? 

And by the way, exactly who is going to "get" it, anyway?