“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” - William Shakespeare.
With this well known quote, the Bard points to an important reality about human life:
that our experience can be parsed in different ways, and one of the most useful is
drawing a distinction between sensation and storyline.
Sensation is the mechanical transmission of a physical event to our awareness.
Nothing very mysterious here: when light hits our retina, when our eardrums are
exposed to rapid changes in air pressure or when our skin is touched, neural
processes report these events to our brain as light, sound or pressure.
Up to this point there is no meaning to the transmission. No good or bad, nothing
desirable or frightening. It is merely one event among billions of other events. But
we obviously experience more than that – because our thinking apparatus
assembles a storyline out of this hash of signals. Storyline is the meaning we attach
to these sense impressions. It’s the model we build of objects and relationships.
Take a simple example: your eyes record a large green mass in front of you,
somewhat wider at its bottom than its top. There are bright regions and dimmer
regions in this mass. Your nose notes an odor. When you extend your hand there
are a number of tiny points of contact on your skin. Taken just as sensory input, it’s
something of a mess.
But when your consciousness assembles these sensations and generates a
‘Christmas tree’ storyline, everything suddenly comes into focus. You see Christmas
lights and ornaments. You smell the scent of pine. Feel prickles from the needles. It’
s not even just a tree with stuff hanging all over it – the story is ‘Christmas tree’. For
most of us, the storyline will also include religious practices, presents, holiday songs
and favorite singers, TV shows we’ve watched for years, particular food, etc. All part
of the storyline surrounding that Christmas tree.
Now, making this observation is fun, but how important is it really? What’s the big
deal?
The deal becomes very big when you recognize that humans live in the world of
storyline much more than we do in the world of sensation. We’re not alone in that
world of storyline, though. Suffering and enjoyment live there with us. We are tickled
by something fun or ticked off by an annoyance in the world of storyline. Everything
we think about our family, friends, enemies – even our own identity – exists in the
world of storyline.
Storylines dictate our words and actions. Even our thoughts. When given the power,
they script our every move, often to our detriment. If I believe in the storyline that has
me subsisting on a diet of pizza and Mountain Dew, what happens when my stomach
tells me it’s empty? If I accept a storyline about money or power being the most
important things in the world, how do think I’ll divvy up my time between work and
family?
There is a LOT we could say about the storylines we live through. Some stories are
more important to us than others –we can take or leave some with a shrug, while we
might have others we’d fight for or die to protect. We get some storylines from our
culture and upbringing, while others are deeply rooted in our biology. We could talk
about how storylines interact – within our own experience, and with the storylines of
those around us. Very often these storylines antagonize one another our own
internal storylines frequently come to blows, and the storylines of people around us
will regularly conflict with our own. And what might we say about the times the world
of storyline clashes with the world of sensation? Libraries full of psychological and
religious tomes have been written about these topics.
But the most important thing to recognize about our storylines is that we aren’t stuck
with them. They don’t exist without our buy in. We can drop some altogether and
rewrite others. People have worked out a variety of ways of doing this over the
centuries among these, three broad meditative strategies have strongly established
track records and proven results. Those strategies are as follows:
* Set our storylines aside for a time. We can do this through stilling/calming
meditation. By placing our attention solely upon a single point of focus (like breath
or a repeated word), experiencing it with none of the normal chatter (storyline), we
connect more fully with the world of sensation. Having set aside our stories during a
meditation session, it is more difficult for them to exert autocratic control over your
behavior when you pick them back up. By itself, this is very healthy.
* Analyze our storylines. Analytic meditation is perhaps the most challenging of the
strategies. The person pursuing this mode of meditation focuses on the very stories
he or she has come to rely on to guide their daily activities. They check out ideas of
permanence and impermanence, independence vs. dependence. Even the story of
one’s own self-identity comes under scrutiny.
The challenge to this style of exercise is two fold. First, these concepts are slippery.
Try locating your sense of self – who and what you really are – right now. Where is
it? How do you sense it? Focusing on your self identity can be like trying to catch a
bar of soap in a swimming pool – you know it’s there, but every time you think you
have it, it slips away, requiring your search for it all over again. Second, this analytic
meditation is challenging because as you do come to terms with your storylines,
many of the things you’d taken as rock solid truths begin to unwind. It can be scary.
For some, it feels life threatening. However, the meditator will need to develop
significant mental strength through stilling/calming meditation before that degree of
analysis can be achieved.
* Rewrite our storylines. Rewriting our stories through generative meditation is
often seen as the most attractive option, but it also holds the most danger for us if we
approach it without sufficient preparation. A fool can just as easily take unpleasant
storylines and, out of ignorance, write an even worse script for himself: a timid
person could script himself as a macho bully, instead of storyboarding courageous
conviction a person currently living separated from their emotions could put
themselves in the role of a sloppy, weepy wreck. Such a mistake benefits no one.
But with the clarity created by stilling meditation and analytic meditation, generative
meditation can be used to cultivate powerful storylines which benefit both the
meditator AND everyone around them.
Each of these flavors of meditation supports the others. You won’t find huge value in
either analytic or generative meditation without a solid grounding in stilling
meditation. And without analytic or generative meditation, stilling/centering
meditation is little more than a relaxing break from the daily grind. Taken together,
though, these three meditative practices will ground you in reality and free you to see
storylines for the creations they are. When you are looking at them from that
perspective, you can put your storylines to their best advantage.
As always, please email any questions around this material to
cjb@TantricChristianity.com. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Vigilate!