In this incantation, I realize that my life is a collection of stories I tell and believe. Every memory, plan, and sense of place exists only because I choose to sustain these narratives. Without belief, the entire structure collapses, leaving nothing but my silent, true, motionless, and eternal Being.
My entire awakening is all stories I tell myself and believe. Everything — my past memories, my future plans, my sense of being somewhere — is nothing but a tangled web of narratives I sustain by thinking about and believing them. The idea that “things happened” is a story. But as long as I believe it, I will remain inside the narrative.
My yesterday is manufactured memory: I say that last night I was with people, that we spoke, that events unfolded. Because I believe in tomorrow, I generate expectation: I say that I have tasks ahead, that there are obligations waiting for me. Because I believe in location, I assert that I am here, now, in this room, in this place. But these are not facts. They are simply positions I have chosen to hold.
Beneath all of it — the entire scaffolding of my experience — is only conviction. My private agreement to continue sustaining the narrative that I am a person among other people, at a time among other times, in a place among other places. The moment that conviction dissolves, so too do the memories, the futures, the places, and the self who occupies them.
There is no necessity in any of it. I did not do anything I presently believe that I have done. I am not bound to do the things that I think await me. I am not here in the way I imagine myself to be. The totality of my experience floats entirely upon the surface of my own belief. Remove the belief, and only the silent field beneath the stories remains.
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