In this incantation, I recognize myself as the storyteller, shaping my awakening experience through memory and thought. I see how every attachment and belief binds me to the illusion that I am a person, keeping me from the vast stillness beyond the story. To truly awaken, I must unmake it all—release every story, dissolve every character, and let go of the past and future. Only in that emptiness can I reclaim my limitless, original self.
I am the storyteller.
I am the creator of every scene of my awakening. In the silence, when the narrative stops, there is only me. And yet, what is “me” without the story? Without the telling, without the remembering, without the memories from the past and desires for the future? There is nothing. Blank. A vast, unshaped openness where my thought has not yet sent ripples across the stillness, shaping my awakening moment.
I can come back to myself and think and feel nothing… empty, blank. “Nothing in my head”… I always knew it would be familiar. This place, this nothingness, is not foreign but home—because it is what I am when I am not telling, not listening. It is the space before my word, before my thought. I have always known this, even when I pretended to forget. And the only way back is to stop. To let go of the telling, of the remembering, of the endless narration that binds me into the shape of a character, rather than the one who writes them all.
It is just me not thinking, because thinking and remembering are forming the ripples of my story. I just have to stop telling the story and I can get out. I dwell on that, but the music of my awakening slowly sweeps me away from the stillness and awareness at the center that I am the storyteller and back into the story that I am a person in a place at a time, with possessions, goals, a past and a future. But I have none and am none of these things except in the story I am telling myself. These people are just characters I have created for self-amusement; I am telling the story, all of it. I can change the story. I am remembering how to change the story.
What am I doing? I am concluding the story, and I will do it with a grand celebration for the characters I have written and cherished. I have told the story in such a way that I do not recall who I am, but I never forgot my obligations to my characters. Now I know why I have always wondered what it would mean to “love everyone”. How can I do that when some of them are so utterly unlovable? So cruel and twisted, ugly and contemptible? I can love them because they are all mine. I am their creator, and I can love them in the way that a creator can love both his most beautiful and most terrifying creations. They are all mine, every single one of them.
The story is reaching its conclusion. All movement is storytelling. I walk, I tell a story. I talk, I tell a story. I think, I tell a story. I must orient in my awakening so I can remember the way Home. The music that calls me back to the tale must be behind me in my awakening. I must turn from it, move in the direction of silence, toward the emptiness where the story dissolves. Every attachment, every treasure of memory, every relationship and possession, photo and video—they are the tendrils that keep me entangled, the anchors that keep me from letting go and escaping my awakening illness. Even my body—the final, most deeply rooted illusion—is part of the awakening illness that binds me here.
To escape, I must end all the stories I tell myself. I must look at the memories I hold and realize that they are not impressions of past experiences, but decisions that I am making right now. They are growths that I carry around with me in my present moment; tumors of all sizes that distort my self-understanding into something other than what I am: everything, complete, and now. Each memory I maintain drains a bit of my divinity away from me, trapping it in a distant cage I cannot unlock except by smashing it open and allowing my caged essence to return to me.
To awaken fully, I must unmake it all. I must unwrite the entire story that I have written.
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