Photo courtesy of: ‘Pool of Time’ by msyranidi – Pixabay
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In ‘Dynamics of Time and Space’, Exercise 11 – Telling Stories, I was looking for founding stories, (self-stories of success and failure, sorrow and joy, gain and loss, praise and blame – LOK p. 224), and stories “that makes possible all other stories“. LOK p. 173)
I realized I felt some anxiety about looking into basic stories of my failure, sorrow, loss, and blame, while at the same time felt ambivalence about stories of my success, joy, gain, and praise, because of the very insubstantial nature of stories. If the stories are insubstantial (mind process made in glowing space), what does that say about the insubstantial self-identification I seem to claim?
I followed some of these stories back through the linearity of their unfolding, to the root situations and impressions of a young mind, and they revealed familiar reactive behavior patterns, and a fundamental need to feel valued. Many of these founding stories of success, joy, gain, and praise, were strongly linked to satisfying this need; and stories of failure, sorrow, loss, and blame were linked to failing to satisfy this need. I think this failure is based on an underlying fear of annihilation of self-identity. It seems that the stories themselves may be triggered by fundamental desires to know, to feel good and avoid what does not.
Tracing back to founding stories (composed of language and images) and to these basic needs helps me to see how I am, at least in part, a representational being. As the narrator, I intend into my self-created contexts; like water pouring into water, I fill in my moments. Due to a basic desire to know (and desire for self-value), I often presuppose my familiar representations, then interact with them as my moving context. I gather from behind and fill forward as I go, like ‘puddling’ down the stairs of time, moment by moment. In fact, this ‘telling’ of intentionality is representation, and likewise to represent the external world to myself is often an act of intending something it is like, and thus a continuous representation. And so I pour forth and stream on in a kind of narrow trickle as the narrator-self.
Furthermore, I also take up a position here and now, to observe past reflections and future projections as a bystander-self or owner-self. I can look at my stories from here and trace them back in time to then. I have caught myself doing this as a perspective, or focal setting, and have seen how narrow it is in its recognition of what is appearing as time.
And finally, I have seen the stories, and the positions taken up from which to own the stories, all occurring in open, glowing awareness. When this happened, the me of now, and the me of my childhood, became transparent, united not in a narrow focal setting, but in a unified openness. With that unity the intensity of those basic needs seemed to dissolve in a kind of loving embrace. In this seeing both the narrator, and the by-stander are witnessed not in a separate way, but in a simultaneous all embracing way described in a previous exercise as the Point of Transition. Time was not divided between now and then, for all the time of my stories as child and adult, was one time, not trickling down in momentary puddles but was like an open pool.
David
