READER: I have now written two pages of my personal story just to get to the question I want to ask you and I have barely scratched the surface. I feel like I need tell you the story of my life for you to know why I am where I am and how you can assist me in coming into experience of my multidimensional resources.
ELIA: What you are offering me is indeed "story"the where-I-came-from-story. What I am about to say to you is not the conventional wisdom and not the popular belief system of our culture at this time in history, but it is a key to experiencing the multidimensional truth of yourself
Each time you recount the story of your life you are renewing it with the energy of nowand your re-identification with it consumes the potential of now by circumscribing it with that storyline. Now is forced to inhabit that container and conform to that storytellers voice and dimensionality.
Yes, our life stories are powerful, meaningful, unique and valuable, but rarely do we perceive the essential meaning or value of our experience in what we construct as our "story." The meanings we usually select are rarely infused with multidimensional insightrarely do they unlock our perception of the purpose and potential of our lives. Instead we craft our stories from a limited menu of limited worldly meanings, from the emotional, psychological, religious and symbolic categories to which we are acculturated, and unknowingly saddle our magnitude of Being with these relatively narrow lenses.
To date we have no other visible models for self-perception. Most of those who live multidimensional or enlightened lives are neither writers nor publicly visible. With no models but the well told tales of human conflict, gain and perseverance toward "success" at whatever their story is about, it is no wonder people live and die building their stories, without coming to any essential enlightenment through them.
Recognition of the reoccurring behavioral patterns and choice points is indeed significant to the psychological and emotional development of the character whos story it is, but those levels of the character are going to die when their writer dies. The psychological and emotional Universe that is occupied only by the one person who has fashioned it as their habitat will fall awayleaving WHAT?? The essential character of THE REAL STORY!! The Being who embodies a value that it seeks to bring to realization in itself AS ITSELF
and in the world as an omnipresence that awakens all to its nature and its nature in all.
The stuff we make our stories of and the meanings we derive from emotional and psychological systems of meaning are the by-products of human unconsciousness and the world patterns it has produced. This is what the unenlightened world offers us, what fills the wardrobe closet our essential characters are cloaked inunless we liberate ourselves from those stories and their costumes. Why spend the whole of our lives identified with the threadbare costumes of past generations whose stories in the world genre did not lead them to enlightenment" Why not set your story free from these self-limiting confines?
So what if there is NO story? What then will you have? How then will you live...and share? To what then will you apply your poetic authorship and creatorhood? What if all the past is not a prolog? What then is it? What would it take to simply be fully present without cartography toolsno mapping, no tracking for meanings in the subjective personal realm? What might the freedom of living in the realm of essential truths rather than subjective or metaphoric truths be like? What is there to lose by giving up your story? If you can name something you would lose, then I suggest you willingly give it upnot by discarding it but by releasing your attachment to it.
You may think this sounds like a lifetime of spiritual work. It can be or it can be a moment--a moment in which you BE in the new way...and the months of reinforcing it that will naturally follow until you have moved everything out of the old story and into your present moment.
To become truly free, truly an enlightened Being, one does not resolve one's past or painexcept in the thin psychological dimensions of subjective consciousness with which popular culture is now fascinated. Instead one dissolves one's past identity constructionsthe "story" wherein the pain and past are maintainedthrough the radical action of identifying with an inspired, inner directed, unfettered self. Through this identification ones multidimensional identity becomes self-evident
and ones previous perception of self and story elicit only a wizened half smile.