Finding You in Spite of Your Story
When an investigator interrogates a suspect, he often asks:
"What’s your story?"
Everyone crafts his story day by day, year by year. Some of
this crafting is personal and some of it is collective; some of it is conscious and some of it is unconscious. It seems necessary
and inevitable that the author of the story is the main subject of the plot. This whole story-making process is built out
of finite building blocks, although it is fueled by the infinite imagination. Every episode in the experience is impressed
upon the memory and gives continuity to the personality and the plot.
Most authors do not recognize the creativity and craftiness
involved in their work. We are sure that our story is 100% true. We have identified so completely with our self-creation that
we protect and defend our self-image with unbelievable tenacity. This is me. It is no story. The way I see it is the way it
is. I trust my senses. I know what reality is. My pain and my paranoia is reality-based. I have been victimized. I have scars
from my battles to prove it. My suffering is from reality, not from my story about reality. There is no difference in reality
and my story about it. Communication problems and wars are due to the fact that other people misconstrue things. All of my
problems arise due to the fact that other people live in their fantasy worlds and according to their warped views of things.
"All the world is queer save me and thee, and sometimes I think thee is a little queer." Anonymous.
Story blindness and story identification is the cause of all
of our suffering and symptoms. Biases, prejudices, opinions, judgments, stereotypes, projections and defenses are all built
upon story commitment. Our attention and choices are controlled by the story we tell ourselves. All of our virtues and vices
arise from our flawed story. If someone cooperates with our story about ourselves, we consider them a friend; if not, then
an enemy.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
Robert Frost
Ere their story die.
Thomas Hardy
My story being done: twas pityful, twas wondrous.
Shakespeare
The saddest story I have every heard.
Madux Ford
But that is another story.
Kipling
Time..shuts up the story of our days.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Its still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
Herman Hupfeld
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest
are these "It might have been"
Longfellow.
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo
Shakespeare
The story’s about you!
Horace
I come from a set of storytellers
and moralists; the storytellers were forever changing the tale and the moralists tampering with it in order to put it in an
edifying light.
Victor Pritchett
One website: www.tellingmystory.com is dedicated to the notion that telling my story is healing:
It is in the transitional world of dreams and daydreams,
visions and symbols, that we can become transformed. We move beyond the literal facts of our lives and begin to envision
and create the hidden plots that restore meaning to our lives.
To live, to move beyond mere survival in life, requires
a new kind of remembering. We invoke the Muses asking them to bring us the waters of remembrance. What was once mere trauma
now becomes a spiritual awakening. a soulful journey into personal truth and meaning.
We tell our tales in a creative rather than fatalistic
manner in order to heal. In the telling of our tales, we find a way of living with our pain, a way of transcending
the sorrows and tragedies through the creative process. We find our healing stories and we tell them, moving us deeper
into the soul of the world.
This is a place to learn about writing the healing stories of
our lives and to find support in moving beyond survival. This is a place for us to tell the stories of our lives.
Telling my story is a way of discovering who I am within and
underneath the story.
Unconsciously believing and living my story is different from
seeking to discover its inner meaning. No one knows the meaning of his story until he seeks its meaning in the greater context
of Infinity. If you find you, it will be in spite of your story. Story is confinement. You are the Infinite in space, the
Eternal in time. Most of the time, our story overlooks this and boxes us into space and time. The question is "Does my story
reveal or conceal the Infinite of me?"
Within our daily story-telling it is hard to see the forest
for the trees.
Everyone has to have an interpreter to find the Truth in his
story, to see the forest among the trees. Where is the Interpreter? In Pilgrim’s Progress, the Interpreter assisted
Pilgrim in understanding the meaning of all that happened to him. The spiritual psychotherapist can assist in the Interpretation
task, but only when he is "in the spirit". The therapist may interpret according to his psychological model of the world,
or he may interpret according to the Infinite. How he diagnoses and interprets (treats) is of great importance.
The difference in the story and the infinite meaning of the
story is critical. We live in a good news/bad news world. The Good News only comes by awareness and discovery. Good News is
not a matter of inheritance, or luck, or winning the lottery, finding the right person, getting the right degree, or earning
a fortune. Good News is a leap of faith and an act of Grace. In your search, It finds you. The Good News is not a story, but
the story is the clothing which the Good News wears, by which it reveals or conceals the truth within.
