Transparent Without Stories And Stuff

The sun warmed me from behind as I picked my way down the rocky trail. The air was filled with birdsong and the smell of sage and alyssum, and it was empty of the sounds of man.

Looking down, I could see my shadow moving ahead of me on the rocks. To those rocks, which have existed long before me and will continue long past my earthly lifetime, my passing over them was a shadow in time.

I felt like a shadow, transparent, weightless, and free because I was not my stuff and my stories at that moment. In that moment, I experienced what we all really are — the same substance as the sun, wind, sage, and rocks.

Perhaps this is what is meant by being absent from the body and present with the Lord.

Then I started thinking again, and I was back into stories and stuff.

Instead of a transparent holy thing, I was once again a bag of stories.

Stories — we all have stories. We tell them all day long to ourselves and to anyone else who will listen. Sometimes, we even tell them to people who would prefer not to listen.

They could be the big stories, like stuff from our childhood, or little stories, like a non-working computer.

We tell stories about how the scales show too much weight and the bank shows too little funds.

We tell stories about heredity, illness, age, and love.

It’s easy to imagine ourselves stuffed with stories. So stuffed with stories there is no place for light to shine through.

To add to the weight, we gather stuff with stories.

A few years ago, I dropped off years of collected clothes at Goodwill. On the way home, I had a moment when I wanted to turn around, go back, and get them.

I hadn’t worn most of them for years, but they had great memories (stories) attached to them, so I had dragged them from one end of the US to another.

For years, they lived in the darkness of my closet, doing nobody any good at all and burdening me with their presence, making me think I was the stories they told.

We are stuck in our stories. We are filled to the brim with stories.

The problem is that we can’t be stuffed full of stories that we own and experience Oneness simultaneously. It’s stories or heaven on earth, one or the other, we have to choose.

We see a story when we read a book or watch a movie. Although we may remember the story, we don’t hold on to it as if it were who we are. We accept it as a story. Sometimes, we learn from it, but we still know it is a story.

When we close our eyes, we can see stories float by. Sometimes, they are stories we tell about ourselves, and sometimes, they are stories we tell about others.

When we collect these stories as if they were real, we add to our already heavy bags of stories. Our bag becomes filled with a collection of short stories, anthologies, fiction, and non-fiction.

What they all have in common is this: stories always separate and divide if we decide they are who we are. Yes, even wonderful stories.

When we don’t own the stories and don’t store them within ourselves, we have more and more moments when we experience being one with everything. The bag of stories becomes lighter. More light passes through, evidence of our true transparency.

The final story to give up is the one that we are humans living a human life and accepting that we are the light instead of the vessel. No matter how many times we tell the human story in all its versions, it will be nothing other than a fairy tale or a horror story, depending on our decision.

No matter how many ways we tell the human story, it doesn’t make it real.

What it does, however, is keep us from experiencing the Light Being that we are, the idea of the one Mind, the action of Love.

Yes, there is a pleasure we receive from the habit of storytelling, but is it worth not experiencing our True selves? We can still tell those stories. We just can’t say that they are real to us. We have to let them fade away.

C.S. Lewis said, “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

We can choose to walk out of our stories and be free to experience those far, far better things. We can “Walk transparent like some holy thing.”

“When from the lips of Truth one mighty breath

Shall, like a whirlwind, scatter in its breeze

The whole dark pile of human mockeries; Then shall the reign of

Mind commence on earth, And starting fresh, as from a second

birth, Man in the sunshine of the world’s new spring, Shall walk

transparent like some holy thing” — Thomas Moore