I have been writing recently. Which is one of the reasons why I haven’t been posting as much here. It started with one roaming story about my experience with a nadi leaf reader here in India in 2016, and then I just kept writing! At some point, I realized that what I am actually writing is my life story, told as a series of Guru stories, in which each story explores a spiritual principle or lesson. The first five chapters are done, and the remaining ones are all in progress… (I think I might have an unusual and disorganized writing process).
But stories are never neutral. And as narrators we are all unreliable : ) Our minds cling to the negative, and “reality is always kinder than the story we tell about it”.
In his discourse on Ashtavakra, Guruji says that our mind sees reality from a distorted point of view–like a double exposed photograph (back when there was film in cameras the film could accidentally be exposed twice– then you would have two images printed on one photograph in a surreal kind of way). In other words, our perception is distorted. We experience something and it leaves an impression, and then when we come to a different situation our mind views it through the lens of our impressions. So as this continues, our view of reality is not just a double exposure, it is a multiple exposure. When our buttons get pushed, we naturally create stories about what is happening as seen through the lense of our wounds. And then, we cling to those stories and they reinforce those old wounds and lead us towards more distorted perceptions. But maybe events are more neutral. Maybe it is really just our perception that makes an experience aggravating or hilarious. Damaging or enlightening. And maybe changing our perception is the key to our inner freedom.
So, I realized that most of the stories I am writing involve overcoming a challenge, and the subsequent wisdom that I gained with the guidance of my guru. But writing about the “challenge” means to expose the way my mind was clinging to the negative at the time! Because every challenge had the potential to be an adventure, I just lacked the skill to see it as an adventure at the time. Nevertheless, each story records how through grace, I peeled back one layer of ignorance. How a ray of light entered a dark space. And these are the stories I want to tell.